[P] DEEP CALLETH UNTO DEEP -

[Marisol]

your oldest fears 
are the worst ones

When she sees him climb onto the rocks, her first instinct is save. 

Her jaw clenches. Wind stirs her dark hair into a frenzy. He must be freezing - even in summer, the sea here roils like a wild thing and does not answer to the call of the sun - she can see the salt and the water dripping from his skin, and after a moment of looking the artful spatter of blood across his chest - and the commander part of her (all of her, maybe) feels the instant urge to fly down and save him.

But as she watches, she realizes he is not shivering. There is no injury on any part of him. The blood that paints him cannot be his. And what was once pity, or concern, curdles in her chest and turns to a violent kind of distrust, clutching at her throat like a claw.

It does not seem real, the way he stands against the sapphire sea, all gray and red like a statue come to life; Marisol has always discounted stories of ocean-horses (with their sharp teeth and dark eyes) as a fairytale, but when she looks down at him over the steep drop off the cliff she thinks that she must be stupid not to have heeded the warnings in those stories, and even stupider to have taken this long to realize. 

She begins to unwind the spear from where it lays wrapped against her back leg.

And when he raises his horn at her, like a knife, like an offering, she is glad - like a secret, like a promise - that she was not so foolish as to leave the citadel without a sharpened blade.

Evening, Marisol calls down. There is no way to know whether it reaches him or is lost somewhere between the cliff’s crags and the ghostly threads of fog, unspooling ever-quicker over the new-blue of the ocean. But her voice - raw and deep and dark - has always been a powerful thing, and even if he cannot hear it, there is no way he cannot notice the way she leans deeper over the edge of the cliff, and the mercurial glint of her grey eyes as they catch his.

@amaroq

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