It is exquisite pain being here.
There is something beautiful in the agony of her resistance. Her eyes close as she feels the dappling of the painted moonlight as it falls across her face. She feels the glow of the moon, through coloured glass and it marks the passage of night across her skin. Sereia’s chin tilts up as to look up toward the surface of the sea which breaks the sunlight and sends it down in dancing shards of light. Being here is like being in the ocean.
With her eyes close, her other senses awaken. She smells all the glorious scents of jasmine, lavender and frankincense which grow stronger on her palette with every in-drawn breath. Then the sugar of eaten pastries still linger in the corners of her lips, sweeter, stickier than she ever remembered as she ate. Sereia’s ears no longer strain to pick up the song of a flute and violin, nor the drum that beats like a heart underneath. They all grow stronger, they all grow more vivid, coming alive within her like light upon a bird’s wing.
But it is her nose that betrays her first. It is easy to dream of the sea, where her body knows how to move and dance and simply be amidst the waves. It is easy to forget she is not simply equine, but kelpie too. The kelpie stirs with the tide of her feelings and remembering. It welcomes the ghostly feeling of the glass-light (like water-light) across her skin. It pushes to the fore stretching out into every inch of her - for how cramped has she kept this part of her? How tightly chained down that the kelpie is stiff and aching when released…
It is the kelpie who smells a boy with vibrant blood. Sweet cakes, sweet sugar grains upon her lips are forgotten in the blissful recollection of blood and meat. Ah, how easy it would be to fall back and succumb to the kelpie’s hunger at last. Sereia watches him, through the light of many colours. It bathes them both, but maybe him the most for his silver skin is the white of a canvas beneath the myriad paints of the stained-glass window.
The boy answers her and she gazes at him, unwavering. It is a soft look, nothing like the sharp teeth she carefully hides behind the softness of her lips. “Oh?” Sereia asks as she smiles with a carnal confidence. “Who will you be in two years time?” She looks to the boy and wonders what great plans he might have. How wonderful it would be to be able to turn yourself into something different!
Then he is turning the question back upon herself. She sighs and moves through the light, watching how it moves across her skin and his. The kelpie watches him and it yearns, thirsty, hungry, weak. Sereia holds herself tight beneath the soft of her skin, she moves like water, though beneath her supple flesh a part of her chinks with the chains she will not release. She holds her demon down and it goes stiff and lame and weary. The girl aches with hunger and yet, yet she smiles a soft and pretty thing for none deserve to die for her hunger.
And that is the problem with her question, is it not?
He turns it back on her: who else would you be?
Beneath the shadowed curve of her lashes she watches him, fierce and dangerous, gentle and compassionate. She is a girl at odds: one so utterly divided into two (and dying with the dissonance of it). The light tries to paint her, soft as water, but she is too slim, too angular, too deprived of meat. She is lovely in a broken way, a dying way. She clings to her stories, her discoveries, her compassion and breathes it like it will be enough to live upon. It isn’t and it never will be.
It isn’t who she wishes she could be, but what.
Just a horse. Her smile says in the corners of her lips where sorrow gathers like tears and blooms like ebony flowers in the shadows. Just a horse, like you. But she is not ready to tell him how she is dangerous and different, how she hears his heart beat and longs to taste him.
Her eyes are still closed, her chin lifted up, as if she is floating as if there is no inner turmoil raging within her lovely bones and the soul they cradle. But she opens her eyes and lowers her gaze to his. The girl laughs and it is as soft and whimsical as the vestiges of dreams, “Maybe you, now.”
And if she was him, she would tell his wondering mind that his smile does indeed look blue and it is the colour of the sea as it flows through coral reefs. The stained glass window must know, because it paints him in all the colours she has ever seen amidst shallow atolls.
@Caspian
I am more wolf than woman
and I am still learning how to stop apologising
for my wild.
~ Nikita Gill
