To be young, to be lovely, to be dangerous. To make a temple of two girls, stained-glass windows of emerald and turquoise. Flowers and fish bones and moonlight at their hooves. Quivering axe, quivering heart, wondering flesh. Looks to lust, and to kill. It's love, isn't it, that causes the snake to eat its own tail?
Anandi has never been given flowers before. Her face opens in a look of pleased surprise. She says nothing of how Apolonia's grip trembles, only reaches to accept the gift halfway with unflinching telekinesis, and draw it to her muzzle. The bouquet smells of spiced, dry heat and resinous sunlight and other things she cannot put into words. Solterra is what she will call it for now. Land of the sun god she so disliked. Apolonia's home.
"Oh, they're beautiful." She smiles broadly. The expression, highly genuine and for this reason highly rare for the kelpie, looks almost goofy on her beautiful, sharp-angled face. It is too broad, too big, too happy for someone so competent at subtlety. It is a crack in the door, and behind it you can glimpse the girl that hides behind it, the girl, full of awe and uncertainty and rose-bud softness, illuminated by a long, slender finger of light.
The door closes, the veil falls, but Andi's still just a little vulnerable, still a little uncertain, still a little soft-- gifts will do that to a girl. "I'll have to stay up here as long as I can, then. To enjoy them. What's this orange one?" Even in the monotone moonlight, the poppy is decidedly orange. Almost stubbornly so. It reminds her of Apolonia, bright and stubbornly beautiful, and she conveys this as well as she can through a heavy-lidded gaze and a catlike smile.
A droning, white-noise restlessness is building in her bones. She needs to do something, anything other than stand here looking at Apolonia. It felt too much like watching a fuse burn, not knowing where it ended. "Lets go for a walk?" Anandi tilts a pretty head toward the forest. It was full of lush darkness and fresh-mud smells and countless unknowns. Most girls would stay far away from it, but of course they were not anything at all like most girls.
After a drawn-out moment, a look that lasts too long, the water horse goes first, paving a way through the sea grass and into the long shadows of the forest. "Tell me about your home, Apolonia," she inquires behind her shoulder. The treasured bouquet is still held close to her lips where she can breathe deeply of lands she's never seen.
A N A N D I
@
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
☾
