IN THE STORY OF PATROCLUS, NO ONE SURVIVES, NOT EVEN ACHILLES WHO WAS NEARLY A GOD. PATROCLUS RESEMBLED HIM; THEY WORE THE SAME ARMOR. ALWAYS IN THESE FRIENDSHIPS, ONE SERVES THE OTHER, ONE IS LESS THAN THE OTHER: THE HIERARCHY IS ALWAYS APPARENT, THOUGH THE LEGENDS CANNOT BE TRUSTED: THEIR SOURCE IS THE SURVIVOR, THE ONE WHO HAS BEEN ABANDONED
I could Make you.
The words struck a cord, deep and dark and monstrous, within her. She tossed her eyes back, her nostrils flared—her tail lashed the water, and sprung up a salt spray between them. A sudden clarity came to Boudika, a clarity overlaid with everything everything she had loved and lost—a life that seemed dreamlike, now, of petty wars and generals, of cadets like toy soldiers and vicious, tremendous sea-beasts, everything and nothing, the ritual ceremonies of gold-streaked horns for battle, the heated, burning lust of combat and more, more, of the ocean, always the ocean, cool where her people burned—
—in Boudika’s dreams, she never swam.
She only drowned.
It was what she dreamt for many nights in prison, awaiting her sentences, and when it came a long last… it was a relief. Even to be dragged through the streets in chains, a pariah and criminal, felt as though a heavy burden had been lifted from her. Her imprisonment had resulted in a resurrection of soul; the betrayal of her people had caused such complete and utter destruction, to survive she had been forced to become something other. To maintain her humanity, she had accepted her own monstrosity. She had been responsible for destroying something as beautiful as it was terrible, something vast and astounding.
“Our people once danced together, Copperhead,” Orestes had told her one night, quiet and calm. It was when he seemed soft, horselike, even more ordinary than her folk—and she had been drawn by the velvet baritone of his voice, to the edge of her prison cell. Their first nights together had been seething hatred, pure fury, demonic wrath. Now? Quiet. Their souls shared their fates. The heat of his skin, through the bars, was an elation and terror she had never thought to imagine. His scent, all salt-water, seaweed, fish, wafted to her—and something about it seemed homely. “The Oresziah and the Khashran, we were brothers and sisters. Our duel gods, lovers, Oresz and Khashra. Our people, one people—mine cursed by their love of the sea, yours by their love of the land, and we were driven apart.”
Those had been the words, in her mind, as they threw stones and jeered at the pair of prisoners. As they fastened their chains to the mast of the too-small sailing boat and sent them to their death by the sea. It had been no one’s doing but her own, it had seemed—every act that had driven them and been hers, her love, her pride, her conceit—
If Boudika had been alone, she would have been taken. But Orestes keened to the angry sky and when it broke and the tempest fell, when the waves became hateful torrents, he was answered by a song older than anything she had ever known, the song of the sea, the song of the storm—
Now she was here. Here. In this moment, her nostrils flaring in the same scent, the hush hush hush of waves that could offer salvation or damnation. The water horse before her was the same and entirely different—salvation or damnation. Their stances statuesque. The water at their hooves. The wheeling gulls, the chill, the strangeness entangled with familiarity—he knew, they shared the same wolfish language, he saw the feelings she could not voice. The cracking of the mast. Orestes, head barely above the water as the iron dragged, dragged, dragged, ”Don’t fight it. Don’t fight it. Don’t swim. Drown.”
The darkness, the twisting shapes, pulling her, nipping, the iron tightening, slackening, twisting, no air, no air, dark, dark, dark, cold, pressing—pressing—pressing—
Novus. The dry sun. Dancing.
And now Amaroq, her dreams and fears, materialised. His voice visceral, close, soft. Everything she had wanted but never voiced, offered, like some god’s cruel trick. It had not been possible among her Khashran—it was their souls, their bodies, that dictated their form. They came and went like the waves, but always of the waves, and Boudika had been of the land, and that was all she had ever been.
She stepped closer—closer—the closest they had been. Nearly chest to chest, close enough to smell the sharpness of the sea on the coolness of his skin, to see the way the bones and shells tangled in his mane and tail, the ocean of his eyes. There was a void in him that called to the void in her, as though an abyss and an abyss could become whole. Close enough their still danced transitioned from intimate risk to deadly.
And I would help you look.
An end to the aching loneliness. Someone who understood—and then, the knowing came back to Boudika in a rush. What if we found him? paired with, What if we don’t? Either way, there was an answer: this water-horse, this strange familiar, oh, how he tempted, how he promised her something either way, in his beauty, in the ferocity of his being.
But there was the question, too, of what it meant to drown. The fear struck her abruptly, completely, the same way it had with her head underwater. Boudika reared back, moving away with the sudden urgency of a creature on the precipice of something both great, and terrible. “I—I—I,” the emotions came to her in a rush, and it was as though she had awoken suddenly from one of her many nightmares. The emotions that came upon her, enormous and paradoxical, were too appalling, too terrific, too extraordinary, too much.
Boudika did not know how she had gotten there so quickly, but her hooves were firmly in the sand, the wind tossing her short mane. There was a wildness in her eyes, not of desperation, but of pure carnal feeling—unfiltered, wordless, belonging to a primordial world—belonging to his world.
Oh, the sea. It called.
But Boudika could not answer it—her legs began to move and suddenly, suddenly, she was running—
To where, she did not know. But the ocean sang in her ears.
WHAT WERE THE GREEK SHIPS ON FIRE COMPARED TO THIS LOSS? IN HIS TENT, ACHILLES GRIEVED WITH HIS WHOLE BEING AND THE GODS SAW HE WAS A MAN ALREADY DEAD, A VICTIM OF THE PART THAT LOVED, THE PART THAT WAS MORTAL. WHEN MY MOTHER DIPPED ME IN THE RIVER, SHE WAS INTRODUCING US.
@Amaroq
