Salt and sand and stone and sea and storm.
The water is black. Reason says no one should be on the cliffside. Reason says the storm is coming. Reason says run girl run as the clouds rush in and the thunder rumbles somewhere on the horizon, as if resonating from the belly of a great and terrible beast. Reason says run girl run there’s still time, there’s still time, there’s still time—
And then there is no more time.
The lightening cracks the sky like a whip. It reflects glass-sharp in the hungering sea and Boudika thinks this is me this me this is me this is me, my soul, crying out, hungering, hungering, hungering—
In all of these days, weeks, months, years the realisation comes to her with that angry sea and brilliant, brazen lightening. She is hungering. The red mare on the cliffside, chest-deep in the grass, separated from the sea only by parapet of rock. Even that she climbs, until there is nothing but air beneath her, a step away. She stands overlooking, a goddess abandoned by the gods, her shape aching to becoming something else.
This is what it is, she knows. This is what it is to want, and want, and want and as she wants the rain unleashes in a torrent, ripping apart the surface of the water below, melding sky and sea. The heavens and the oceans are stitched together in one chaotic thread.
And the things she wants are endless.
Give me a thousand shapes, give me Orestes back, let me taste Torix’s flesh in every way I can, give me the goodbye I deserved with my father, I want to sink my teeth into Tenebrae, I want to sail to a beach where no one knows my name and become something else entirely—
But Boudika stands at the end of her known world. She stands, the rain slicking her copper hair to something dark, something black. Aside from her shining eyes in her bald face, she is all black, all sin. It is only when the storm reaches its pinnacle that she begins to keen to the sea, a soft-sweet sound that rises and rises and rises and begs and begs and begs to be met with something more, with everything, as within the girl the wants of a god tremble on feeble, mortal wings.
I want to jump. But the wants outweigh that desire, and she trembles with all the things that are no longer graspable. She closes her eyes and feels the rage of the spring storm, the rain a cold lash to the face. There is something inconsequential and insurmountable building within her; an anger; a righteousness; a desire; and she never knew the taste of freedom is flesh and blood and rain on slick, sharp teeth.
@anyone || “speech.”
