[P] it's only slaughter, only blood

[Taisce]

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It came with the threat of a waning moon And the wail of an ebbing tide, Dear Wormlust,   In the black of a whispering sea you both did meet.   In the deep where secrets hide and bodies lie forever entombed within a watery grave so deep, so dark, so cold. That is where you two monsters convened with lupine teeth that catch the rippling light.   He thought you were a ghost, with your phantom fins; thin as gossamer. They caught a light that should not reach as deep as you both had sunk. Taisce did not tell you, but oh how he knew, even then, just how fragile your wings are. Already he could feel the way they would rip beneath the sharpness of his teeth. It set his jaw to tingle with electric anticipation. His teeth clacked and bubbles blew; hungry was the monster here.   The corals, sharp and wicked, reached out to cut and draw first blood. But Taisce did not stray close to them. He did not even dash a limb against the growing reef. Though it was a beautiful landscape beneath him, made to frame the beauty of the ocean’s terrors, it could not draw his gaze from you, another kelpie. In that world of secrets and colours, with a blue like midnight and corals like the gold marbling his skin, Taisce watched you, Wormlust.   His pearl eyes, full of foam, full of savage waters, watched only you. In the dark your wings flared wide, pulled by the tide, made grand and ghostly by the white of you. Gills upon his face did flare, drinking air as his eyes drank in the whole of you.   He might have thought you were beautiful then, if he had a heart to care. But oh, Taisce is a tiger of the sea. He is too content to hunt alone. The bone white of your skin made of you the froth and foam of a riled sea; but Taisce is the deep, consuming dark, where gold treasure glitters upon the corpses of the dead.   As he watched you that day, he thought of how that it was you who strayed, Wormlust; it was you who strayed into his territory. Words rose from your lips in bubbles large and small. The smallest of which still clung to your ivory lips, too afraid to leave, to ever be spoken.   As the midnight to your starlight he hung, suspended in blue, with his mane and tail aloft, drifting like seaweed. As he floats with the restless waters, much the same as you, his ears fall to his skull. Like an eel he struck forward to clack his teeth as a riled fox might. There was nothing tame about Taisce, despite the collar of servitude that rusts about his muscled throat.   You rose above the reach of him, an angel ascending with a body as aloof as flotsam caught in the tide. You circle and watch, hungry and rabid, distant and beautifully savage. He was content below, for that is where he belongs. He circled you too, his chin arched up, his eyes watching, watching, watching. Silvered teeth gleamed sharp and savage, a haunting cry – more like a song, more like a harpy’s screech – rises from his lips like air.   You circled together, water swirling with you, about you. You were both sharks in that moment, hungry and savage but waiting and tasting. “And what are you but flesh and bone?” He asked at last and his tongue thought it already knew the taste of you. T A I S C E