YOU SYMBOLIZE THE GRITTY EDGES OF MY OUTRAGE LIKE SALT -
I grind you into my wounds and you bite like salt
The tide drifts inward as a river – a curve like a sickle, cutting through stiff lines of shore, and, further inland, muddy gorge. In the deep center of the estuary, where the water is darkest, the sharp curve of a fin breaks the surface. The pale lash of a tail. Bull shark, Locust thinks (no, knows) as she watches it slice through the grey skim of waves with surgical precision. She finds the movement admirable, though she knows it is what it is meant to do; even when she swam, and she dares not swim anymore, she never had a choice but to fight the water.
Her knife hangs in the air in front of her, twirling around the curves of her invisible, telekinetic fingers absentmindedly. (She scarcely even looks at it.) Each revolution is a sharp click; a nervous twitch that she developed sometime in childhood.
It is high tide, and the rising sun is red. It hangs on the horizon, a thick glob of magma which makes the bobbing waves look like flames, rippling with distant heat. Behind her, it is still night; the world is dark blue, nearly dark enough to seem black, and the faint, hazy outlines of the stars and a disappearing sliver of moon remain visible even to the naked eye. The world is two-tone, the very contrast an act of violence – and, though she has seen many dramatic sunrises while out on the sea, where the water is sometimes so flat and calm that one can see for several miles in any direction, this one feels unnatural to her. The ocean is not itself. She has spent time in these waters, on one boat or another, but it feels unrecognizable.
She is not yet sure what that means. It is not like being on foreign shores; it is like being on something that is not a shore at all, even as she stands with her hooves just-buried in the pale lick of salt, barely out of reach of the ocean’s hungry mouth. She knows that the water will climb no higher, so she stands dangerously close to its briny tendrils, like a free man come to taunt a chained prisoner.
There are certain times when, in her line of work, Locust can almost forget the way that her stomach drops when she stands too close to the sea. This is not one of those times. The shark disappears beneath the current, and, a moment later, she thinks that she sees a splash of red drift to the surface.
(As a girl, hadn’t she swum with sharks? But that was so long ago now – god, she was getting old.)
She has encountered others on this island, while she has searched for one thing or another, but they have not lingered for long; there is a part of her that wishes that she’d brought a few members of her crew along with her, but another, more reasonable part of her knows that they lack the spine of the Sea Star. Most were relatively young and inexperienced, and, with no loyalty or obligations between them, they were apt to spook at the first sign of danger.
The island, of course, was dangerous. She was not yet sure if it was the danger of something cursed or something blessed. The natives told stories of their gods, but she was not a religious woman; blind faith was worthless, and even that which you saw with your own two eyes was often untrustworthy. She was not sure if the distinction mattered – regardless of whether it was cursed or blessed, she was neither native nor believer, and she hadn’t come here for blessings besides.
She had come here for August, or for the possibility of some kind of treasure, both of which, she supposed, she could consider blessings – but she had also come to the island because, like the song of a siren, dangerous things had always called to Locust, and she had discovered that it was always best to seek them out, rather than let them find her.
The knife turns. Clicks. She watches the water, which still does not feel to her like water should, and she wonders what she is hoping to find.
(Perhaps, somewhere in the distance, she sees something stir.)
@Amaroq || -insert discord eyes emoji here-
"Speech!" ||
