and I tremble and grow pale
for I am dying of such love
The moon is hanging like an ornament in the perfect center of the sky. It is perfectly full, totally round, and shedding silver-shine easy as water onto the beach, where O stands and tries not to tremble as she waits and waits and waits—for I am dying of such love
She has waited far too long already—
Calm down. The beach is littered with salt and ebbing foam. O digs her hooves deeper into the sand and tries not to sway as the wind comes to batter her, snarls its fingers in her hair, sends her pulse rocketing up to her teeth. Her whole body shakes with cold adrenaline. The island is seemingly empty; the shadows are long and deep all around her, and if O were younger or more easily scared, she might find herself unnerved by the way they twist their fingers into the landscape like a Halloween witch. Instead, what she feels is impatience.
Growing stronger and stronger by the moment. Gnawing a hole into the pit of her stomach. Every second she stands alone sends another hit of acid crawling through her organs. Please show up, O thinks, and her desperation is a dull drumbeat in her chest. Like its own heart. Please be here.
The waves aren’t still, but their movement isn’t… right. It’s not what O is looking for. Not what she really wants. She is waiting (too eagerly) for a disruption of the tides, for a head to break the surface and the foam to split around a head of gray, pink and white. She is waiting (too urgently) to see Anandi again, to admit her pretty weakness—I haven’t stopped thinking of you—and hope and pray, as if she were really religious, that the water-girl will say the same. She is waiting, like a fool, for the love or the lust of someone she has only met once.
She did not think she would be… this. Not now, not ever. But of course, times change.
Tucked into the hilt of her hurlbat, at her hip, is a bouquet of Solterra’s finest flowers. They have a different kind of beauty than the lush, tropical petals that grow on the island here, and still a different appeal than Delumine’s or Denocte’s brightly colored flora, but they are uniquely pretty. Hardy to a fault. Appealing for their dusty stubbornness. And, lucky for her, it is the season for the Mors’ prettiest blooms. Bright-orange poppies freckled with sedative seeds, sprigs of deeply purple coulter’s lupine, fists of flowers from the beavertail cactus, sloshed in perfect vivid pink; bound in pale twine, they sit comfortably next to the blade of her axe.
O’s blue-black mane is bound in a waterfall braid, and her forelock and tail are brushed into pin-straight sheets. The flowers bristle against her skin. For once she almost looks like a girl.
