AT NIGHT I LISTEN TO MY DEAD HEART AND NAME IT AFTER A DEAD COUNTRY
THE BIRDS IN MY BLOOD STOP MID-FLIGHT. WHEN I THINK OF YOU, A WAR ENDS.
THE BIRDS IN MY BLOOD STOP MID-FLIGHT. WHEN I THINK OF YOU, A WAR ENDS.
You think it wails to me?
Neither of them belonged in the illusion, in the night that cried with unseen predators and a stream that sang, and sang, and sang in a pitch like mourning. But his impassivity enticed her; the slant of his neck, the sharpness of his singing horn, the glacial coolness of his skin. It was at once familiar and foreign. It was at once everything she had ever known and nothing she knew at all—and that, there, was the source of her enthralment. He was the aching answer to a question she had never thought to ask.
When she leapt nearer, he spun upon her like the beast she knew he was. But the predictability of the reaction was a comfort, and Boudika did not flinch. Her girl self would have called her foolish. The Boudika that had arrived mere months ago, the one that had first met him, would have cringed at her boldness. But not this Boudika. Not this Boudika, who ran through fires to capture strange, barred boys and kept herself on an island that seemed like a curse. Not this Boudika, who ran until her heart felt like bursting and screamed from mountain tops. Not this Boudika, who dreamt at night of ocean things singing ocean songs.
And with their eyes on the twisting, gleaming stream her attention roamed to him. There is a catch there, in his expression; an echoing sort of emptiness and glint of eye that Boudika is familiar with, because it is sorrow. An emotion Boudika had come to embrace; had come to know with all the intimacy of family. Seeing it in his expression, reflected so clearly—
He moved away. No place knowing ever is. Boudika said nothing, because it was the truth, and it was perhaps the very reason she was there. Because. There was an aching answer in the darkness, to a question that filled her with fear.
And they were fire and ice. Crimson and cerulean. Where they met, they were opposites; where they met, they did not belong in the throbbing darkness of the night, or the unfathomable colours of the stream. Were they not both hunted? Were they not both the last of their kind, in one way or another? He withdrew, his gaze, his self, and the chasm that opened was one her heart echoed—because she knew the pain, she knew the hollowness, and his promise came back to her. “I could Make you. I could Make you like me. And then you could search for him below every shore, in the trenches of the deep, in the corals and kelp forests. Everywhere. But more and more Boudika knew—he was everywhere. Had those not been his very words? I will always be the sea.
Boudika could not help but step forward at his downcast eyes, attracted with a sort of gravity that could only be explained in that level: gravity. It was the weight of planets, of meteors, of things celestial.
Or more—the crushing pressure of the ocean. Boudika felt as though she were sinking, when he looked at her again. As though there were some force beyond her, crushing her, but not in a way unpleasant. The bones in his hair sang. The water sang. The night, full of things unknown and unknowable, sang. And when he touched her there was nothing but wildness in her veins, nothing but a demand, more, more, more and the song of the wailing stream, the colours as they turned subdued—and began to fade in shades of indigo, of sapphire. Were they not already underwater?
“What will we hunt?” And it is not quite an answer. But the question ached and ached and ached within her, worse than any type of arthritis, worse than any hunger. Boudika stepped forward, and the heat of her flesh was there to meet the icy coolness of his; a jaw that, lest his move, would slide nearly threateningly along his neck. And a horn, when cocked, which would clink every so slightly against his own as she passed, until they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and she found her breath short and fast and—
It felt like everything she had ever loved and feared about the sea. Her tongue tasted like the memory of salt. Her heart, with the memory of battle and violence and the sucking pull of the sand beneath her hooves, the ragged crash of waves, and the sensation of falling—always falling. It’s in your nature he had said once, a lifetime ago. And in it perhaps he had only meant it was in her nature to be tied, irrevocably, to the wild thing she hunted. Was she herself not Bound to them, in her fear, her enthralment, her preoccupation? Had she not sworn some oath, a soldier's oath, to a cause that nearly married her to their feral, wild, twisting nature? Had she not been Bound, too, when her own people had sentenced her to death, to die alongside the last of them, of her water horses?
Would it not sicken them to know, the world was full of such creatures?
The stream went dark again, aside from the slight light of the original blue bioluminescence of fungi on trees.
In the darkness, she felt only her own heartbeat, and heard only his breath. And Boudika did not know if what she wanted was the freedom of the hunt again; or the death that every hunt must end in.
@Boudika"speaks"
