ares who exchanges
bodies for gold;
bodies for gold;
The island is full of strange things, even stranger than O. She is not particularly surprised that one of them has walked out of the depths of the ocean right in front of her.
The thing, the girl, is beautiful. The sleek grey of her body is something ethereal under the tongue of the moon; bright orange-pink things, fins, maybe, spiral back from her forehead. O is standing in the cool shadows of the jungle and finding it harder by the minute to catch her breath. Her heart is pounding in her chest like it has a story to tell her, and her shallow breaths are starting to build in the back of her head. They are separated only by a thin stretch of bone-white beach.
O is not easily impressed, but this is different, this is—a kelpie, she can only guess, having never seen one before. But who else would come striding out of the water so easily? What would leave hoof prints patterned in the wrong direction? Oh, what drips off of her could be water but O thinks it’s more likely pure moonlight, sweet and thick as honey but twice as silver. For the first time in her life the little girl thinks about her own body. Thinks about her terribly narrow hips and the sooty, dingy black that patterns her legs. Thinks about the salt-tooth knots in her short, dark hair.
It is dark, though, and that helps. A little. She slinks further back into the comfort of the jungle. It is cool and dark, and O has spent so much time here recently it’s almost starting to become familiar; she is comforted by the cold, sweet wind that goes rushing by overhead and the smell of petrichor wafting up from the loose dirt at her feet, underneath a blanket of wonderfully glossy leaves. Bugs and birds chatter all around, easy and ceaseless as a machine. But not so loud that O cannot hear her thoughts. Thoughts that say, Go, go, go say hi. Go speak with the girl. Speak with the god—
Now the girl-thing is walking a little faster, splitting the distance between them by decimals. O’s eyes (at least the ones that are visible) are huge in the dark. Her heart is still thrashing a little out of pace, a little more out of tune: but something possesses her to step forward, and then she is half in the light, enough to raise her head in something between interest and defiance.
“Hello,” says Apolonia, and she does not quite recognize the sweetness of her own voice.
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