The stranger smells like a bouquet Anandi was given once. It was a fragrant, dusty thing, full of desert flowers and herbs; the scent of it forever tied subliminally to a girl with two names and a hurlbat.Anandi might claim it was the night and the sea that brought her here, but really it was the scent of the stranger. She followed it like a hound through the court, through the crooked streets of the crowded marketplace, down a well-worn path to the sea. Hoping-- with a fierceness that felt like hunger-- it was her tri-colored girl she would find at the end of the trail.
But it was not Apolonia. It was in many ways her opposite: winged, horned, sleek black. Mane long and wavy. Anandi swallows her disappointment.
“Boring, isn’t it?” The kelpie gestures to the court, which sits on the slope behind the stranger’s shoulder, shrouded in a smoky orange haze of its own creation. Anandi found the bonfires gratuitous and distasteful. She feared she was going to smell like smoke for weeks. But here, by the sea, the night was vast and dark and comforting. The air sharp, crisp, briny-- familiar. As her eyes adjust to the darkness of the night, she takes in the winged mare appraisingly, expression catlike and pleased.
The kelpie is, of course, keenly aware of the water, a mere stone’s throw away and arching closer and closer. The tide was rising, swelling, and the beast in her responded in kind. She thinks offhandedly of striking, dragging, drowning-- how quickly and brilliantly this conversation could end.
She smiles sweetly, to keep from growling. The hunger in her is dark and vast and does not like being ignored.
“I’ve not seen you around before,” her voice just a little hitched, a little husky, suggestive of I would have noticed you, even in a crowded room, and when she smiles she does so broadly, not bothering to hide the sharp white of her teeth. They were so very far from the festivities of court, from anyone who might come to investigate if there happened to be strange sounds coming from the sea. “I’m Anandi. What’s your name?”
corrupts absolutely,
or almost.
A N A N D I
@Lucinda <3
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
☾
