Constant

[Seraphina]

Sometimes Seraphina tried to think about her firsts.

“Tried” was, naturally, the key word. Memories, she thought, were supposed to be somewhere - even if you didn’t think about the first time that you say something, or heard something, or felt something every time you saw it or heard it or felt it, you still knew about it, and some part of you would probably always associate whatever it was with that first experience, regardless of how familiar or different that something became. Standing in a sheltered alcove on the far side of the Vitae Oasis, belly-deep in cold blue water, Seraphina tried to remember the first time that she had seen the Oasis. For a fraction of a second, she recalled a brush of sunlight on rippling waves, but nothing else that she’d think that she would associate with it. She didn’t remember the color of the water, the brush of sandy air, the sudden coolness when she stepped into cool blue waves – something that she never would have felt before. She didn’t remember seeing green that she’d never seen before, lingering beneath these verdant trees with a quiet reverence. The image she could recall wasn’t a memory so much as it was a line of text that she could read; it was a thought, rather than a picture. She didn’t know why she was at the Oasis the first time. She remembered that she came. She remembered this place, called the Vitae Oasis, and she understood it in a scientific sense, like she was hearing it secondhand from a story told by someone else entirely. When she thought about it, tried to grasp for something that simply wasn’t there, Seraphina was overcome with a sense of dull, throbbing pain that she couldn’t quite place. (The past three months had been the clearest of her life.)

Closing her eyes, she dipped her muzzle in the cold, clear waves, but she didn’t drink the water.

The sound of motion from the opposite shore pulled her from her thoughts and reverie, and she peered around the rocky edge of her small cove, mismatched eyes running along the tree-covered sandbank; a moment of searching revealed the shape of a youth. He didn’t seem to have completely grown into himself, but, from her rudimentary – and distant – observations, he was well-built and compact for his small stature, athletic and muscular. His coat was a mix of black and pale roan; darkest along his legs and the sea of tiger-like stripes that ran down his back, but light in its base. His mane and tail were distinctly wavy, and cut sharp, a mixture of creamy off-white and black. Seraphina couldn’t see his eyes, as his back was turned to her, but she thought that she saw the glint of something around his throat; it put her in mind of her own collar. He was currently leaned up against one of the trees, forelegs hiked up on its trunk, head inclined to stare into the branches. Was he looking for something? She supposed it didn’t matter. She didn’t recognize him, so she imagined that she should figure out if he should be here in the first place.

The water parted around her lean frame as she sloshed her way across the Oasis; it brushed up only a few inches further up her chest at its deepest, to her relief. She emerged dripping on the other bank, coat sleek and shiny in the bright light of day. With a decent gap still between herself and the youth, Seraphina stared him down, and, her curiosity getting the better of her desire to interrogate him on his intent, for the moment, asked, “Is something up there?”



@Kauri - sorry this took so long, lovely <3