with a ravenous tongue
licked from your palm a rift of salt--
The night was so beautiful that Anandi was not thinking (much) about the hunger, the constant, gnawing hunger, the devil dressed in white. She did not think she was thinking of the ocean, and yet… as the rosy twilight faded to night, she found herself drawn to the water. Not the violent, salty water she was used to but something far different. This water was flat and still and fresh. The scent of it was almost sweet; while this intrigued the kelpie, it also faintly disgusted her-- if the lake were not so beautiful in the way it fashioned itself a temple to the moon, it would be atrocious.
Anandi needed deep water and strong currents, waves crashing delightfully on the rocks. She needed salt and blood and room to hunt, to pierce and shake and thrash. She needed all of these things (and more, always more, more red, sticky, beating red) to bow low to the devil that lived behind her eyes. And the lake contained none of them.
She was not alone at the water tonight, but this did not bother her. Such beauty deserved be shared and reveled in. And the mare standing knee-deep in the lake was an exquisite specimen. Anandi just watched for a moment as a boy approached, peddled conversation, left. No game at all. The kelpie snorted, unimpressed.
As the boy leaves, Anandi approaches. She moves smooth and sure as a sickle over the lake’s sloping shore. Her skin greedily soaks up the moonlight. One quiet step into the cold water, then another. She does not flinch. She does not feel the cold. Eventually she draws next to the crowned stranger, no more than a length or so away. When their eyes meet the water horse smiles coyly, almost shyly.
The way they stand together they are oil, slick-beautiful on the moon-mirror lake. The earth holds its breath like the start of a fairytale, or a song.
And then Anandi is gone.
She slips beneath the water with a very quiet, shucked-oyster sound, and Manon is all alone with the night and the water and the moon... and the moon’s reflection, which wavers delicately like an illusion about to burst. Like the film of a dream, on the edge of exploding and revealing either something very terrible or very marvelous.
The kelpie's head eventually rises from the water several lengths in front of the exquisite stranger. She smiles shyly at the other mare once again, water dripping like diamonds from her muzzle. “Are you a princess too?” Anandi gestures towards the stranger’s crown, her jade eyes gleaming silver beneath long, dark, fluttering lashes. The full, heavy moon sits behind her shoulders and shimmers around her beautiful features like a wedding veil.
@
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
☾
