the sun shines low and red across the water,
Avesta does not feel alone as she should. The sea is roaring in her ears as it brings the tide in to lash out a fury against the cliffs curling around her small bay. It is the only sound echoing against the rock (and against the curved bone of her skull). There are no gulls calling a storm-song over the crags and no crabs snapping in and out of the small outcropping of dune-grass. Nor are her parents, or her sister, here to keep her grounded.
Although she knows that not too far away, in her castle, they have surely noticed she is missing.
Again.
She should feel smaller than she does too. Against the violent sea her bones are nothing more than dry wood waiting to be bleached and washed out to some distance shore. Avesta is young and delicate. The sea is a monster as endless as she is new, as violent as she is wild. With just a turn of the wind the storm-clouds, that are starting to paint the sky with darker and darker shades of black and blue, could sweep her away like a seed of nightshade.
From way up high where the sun and the moon watch, she thinks, the world must look like it is bruised and beaten.
Foras is watching, from a distance not as high as the gods, and each time Avesta encourages him to welcome the storm with her, he only says, I do not like the sea. Over and over again his answer never changes and his white jaw, bloody from a rabbit, does nothing more than frown a wolfish, childish scowl at his unicorn dancing in the storm tide. Something inside him starts to wake up, to crack open like winter, and blow through all the hot blood screaming through him each time a wave lashes violently against the rock. But he still does not try to go to the water.
Avesta wanders deeper into the sea that is only now starting to roar beyond the cliffs and against the sand of her cove. It's cold and she shivers when it splashes against her sun-warmed and fever-hot side. A shell, long empty and hollow and dead, slides across the sand towards her. And it's not until it cracks against her ankle, that she realizes how deep she's wandered into the waters.
Or how dark the sky has become.
She pulls back towards the shore and only then starts to wonder how long, and how furious, this storm will become. The meek tame part of her knows she should turn home, and that Foras has the right idea to watch from a distance with a belly full of food. But the wild part of her, the part that is all salt-water and brine, howls primordial at her. It begs her to stay a little longer, just until the sky turns as black at night and there is no summer sun left to find her.
It is only the howling part that Avesta listens to.
@Aster
