The only thing Boudika had ever feared was the sea.
Her father had taken her to it when she was newly born—stumbling on trembling, confused legs, without speech to clarify her thought, without words for the emotion she felt. The memory stood out starkly. There had always been something missing about the moment; and it had taken Boudika many years to conclude it had been the presence of her mother, who had died in childbirth, an act of matricide her father had never forgiven her for.
These were her thoughts, as she stared at Terminus Sea, out on the edge of the Night Court. She stared and stared.
Her father had taken her to it, on her trembling foal legs. He had taken her to it, and with an aggressive muzzle, pushed her forward, stumbling, into the surf. It had foamed at her hooves and an innate fear had struck her, a fear like a lightening bolt—she had leapt back toward the presumed safety of her sire, only to be pushed, again, toward the danger of the sea.
Boudika would later learn this is what the Oresziah, her people, did to those young infants who were cursed as mother-killers. Especially the young fillies, the females. They offered them to the sea. Yet that day had been storming, tumultuous, and it drove the Khashran from the dangerous ocean; they would come to shore stark, raving, slick as oil and as untouchable as the deep of Mariana’s trench.
Her father’s insistent urging against her instincts drove her step-by-step into the angry waves, until she stood up to her chest, and press of water nearly took her from her feet. There were shifts in the waves all around her—breaking, crashing, slippery shapes, easily mistaken for flashes of light or shifts of sea. Boudika was too young to fully comprehend the swarm of Khashran that had appeared, that swam beneath the water in forms foreign, in forms unknown.
Her father had watched anxiously from the shore, for his only offspring to be taken into the deep. And Boudika had stood with steel and iron grit. She had stood without trembling, without the heart palpitations of true terror—even when the surf had broken before her into the form of a horse—but only a creature trying to be a horse, a creature almost ripped apart by the urge to be something else— bearing a ghastly smile full of teeth, and she had later thought she knew what the gods were, and the gods were cruel, primal things.
The eyes on that almost-horse would visit her for many years in her nightmares; reptilian and fish-like all at once. A ageless a shark’s primordial stare; slick with silver and running water. The stallion had stared down at her, with a mouth full of razor teeth, a mouth of crushing jaws, a hunger for flesh. Those eyes slid from her, too-slick, and had settled on her father beyond.
That day, the Khashran did not take her. And her father walked her back to the cliffs as she shivered against the brisk breeze. He walked her back to their homestead and shut himself away for many days before reemerging. When he did, he told her she had been chosen; he told her she would never be called Boudika again, only Bondike, and they would disguise her as a colt. One day, he said, she would be a general.
Because she had no fear.
Now, at the Terminus Sea, she felt that fear again. He had been so wrong, to say that; her fear had only been masked, perhaps, by her curiosity—her draw to the siren’s song, the allure of the Khashran her people had long-since forsaken. But even now, to wade into the cold, winter-wet surf… it was difficult for her. She knew these waters were not populated by the same monsters; she had been told as much. For each step Boudika took into the lapping waves, her gaze jerked along the near water, then the horizon—searching for the quick and deadly shadow of her old enemies. There were none, and somehow, inexplicably, that disappointed her. Why did they have such dead eyes? She had wondered. Why did they look so predatory?
You’re just a dancer now, she remaindered herself, transitioning from her questioning, the words ringing hollowly within her. Another step, and another—pushing now, chest-deep into the sea. Her mind rang with an emotion; her heart; her body. What was it? She did not know, but part of her wished it could be consumed. Another step, another—her feet off the sand, the waves pushing her from the solidity of the ground so she was weightless.
The water was stinging cold. The type of cold that was so cold it burned, it became hot. She stared at the bleak horizon—the weather didn’t even know what it wanted, half-way to a storm, but not quite there. She closed her eyes and with a forward propulsion of her limbs, dove beneath the water, exhaling deeply.
Deeper, deeper—and then her lungs burned, her muscles ached, her body demanded a reprieve—and she sat heavy, fighting her own buoyancy, thinking about what it would be like to drown.
But the call for air was too strong and she reemerged, quite a way from the shore. She gasped for breath and wondered for how long she had been submerged—too long, not long enough. It was a trick she would never have dared to try on Oresziah—the thought, sudden, abrupt, unwelcome, shook her to the quick. She immediately moved back toward the shore, fighting down a feeling of sickness, of great and terrible fear.
Boudika, when her hooves struck sand beneath the waves, began to run. She was slowed by the water, but began to make time once she got knee-deep, then shin-deep, then ankle-deep, and she was breaking free. She shook her head, violently, snorting water from her nostrils, blinking against the sting of salt in her eyes.
What had changed? What had changed that she could fight her fear and swim in the sea? What had she been looking for, beneath the waves? She licked the salt from her lips, from her hide, violently flicked her whip-like tail—and stared, stared, stared at the sea. What had changed? There was something in herself, growing larger and larger every day, that she did not recognise. Something wild, untapped, undisciplined; a surmounting desperation, a need that was borderline lustful, but for what?
@Amaroq
