No, he groans against her touch, and pushes her away. Yet the sea will not keep them apart. They are buoys treading water, tethered together by invisible string. Boudika, fearless, presses against his blade, even as it pricks blood.
I cannot believe there are beasts worse than you. The raw-edge of his voice, like flesh too wounded to recover, tells Boudika he is trying to hurt her with more than his magic. And then, go back. Boudika does not have to be told twice. With deft gracefulness she swims away, putting the sea between them. The salt stings her wounds in a way that seems like a welcoming, a come back to me. In face of his rejection, she wants to. Her pride stings more fiercely than her wounds, and then—
Show me.
Boudika trembles; in his asking she experiences a revelation. I don’t know how. To his unasked questions, there is only the sentiment of she is still learning. The change is something she has suppressed; something she has tried not to question. And now Boudika does. Now the loneliness gnaws upon her heart as if it is mere carrion; perhaps it is. How is she supposed to say, I don’t know?
Amaroq had disappeared after her creation and since then, she had been alone. There had been no water horse to teach her how to become more than instinct, to be. It was only Boudika, and in this she was forced to face the inhumanity of her past. Had she not subjected Orestes to the same fate? The last of his kind? Had she not wished to spare Amaroq of the torture by becoming his companion?
She turns to Tenebrae, now, with a flash of anger. Her eyes, already red, gleam gem-bright above the waves. He demands her to perform her transformation as if it is a circus trick? As if it exists as some kind of proof? The magic seems as if it has lived within her for a lifetime, even with its newness, even with its uncertainty. Boudika's magic feels like fate, even as she struggles to understand it. Show me. Show me. It is a demand, and the only reason Boudika answers is because of her half-finished apology. With the high, angry tide and the moon beyond the clouds, her power feels strong. Her blood sings with the storm. Boudika pins the monk with her eyes again with the sea between them. Then, her body like a play of light, she becomes the mirror of Tenebrae, down to his glowing sigils.
“What else would you like to see, Tenebrae?” her voice is seething, the sound of water draining from jagged rocks. Yet Boudika's voice is his voice, even as she speaks, even as she says, “The magic is new to me and yet it has already grown strong, and stronger still. Would you like to know how my shape has become transient? How there are moments when, amorphous, my soul longs to become a crocodile, or a shark, a jaguar, or a tigress? An albatross, a dolphin? Or how I know, in my heart of hearts, one day I will become the sea? A whale, a dragon, a great and terrible serpent?”
The anger is what fuels her next transformation; she already feels heavily fatigued, and it is the first time she has transformed so rapidly. But abruptly, like a sleight of hand gone unseen, Boudika's form ripples from her imitation of Tenebrae to one of her more favoured shapes; a tiger shark’s dorsal fin slips silently beneath the water. When Boudika submerges, she is met with the topungent odour of fresh blood.
Everything within her cries, more, more, more. She swims a distant circle from Tenebrae; her body cuts through the water with the deftness of a blade. The world below is a kaleidoscope of light and dark, rushing water and opaque forms, billowing kelp beds and the dart-like, scattering of schools of fish. Boudika streaks blood from her wounds from the water and she returns to him, an ominous fin that cuts blade-like the uppermost, raging waves. The storm is welling, the depth of the water increasing by the minute. She trails around Tenebrae in narrower and narrower circles, with enough distance between them to be unthreatening but no less ominous. At times, Boudika submerges entirely and reappears nearer than before; or submerges and brushes just beneath his body, so he may feel the rush of her movement but not the touch of her scales. Tenebrae is bleeding in the water and a shark, archaic and primordial and terrible, circles him as if for the kill. But even as Boudika swims, she retains her rage and spits it at him in formless words,
What other tricks ought I perform for you, Tenebrae?
Then:
Disappearance?
With the word, her fin slips beneath the water.
For an indefinite amount of time—so long he might not even know if she intends to return—she resurfaces nearby as an equine, wild, water-swept hair that tangles and gnarls in the water. Her eyes are hard and fierce and she says, “What else, Tenebrae?” And in her voice the storm resonates. Within her voice, there is a rage like the sea’s and a sort of raw helplessness, the same helplessness of an ocean that batters the shore day after day after day but never joins it. In her display of magic, of power, Boudika feels utter separated, as if cleaved from everything she has ever known. This, Boudika knows, is why Caligo chose her. So a mortal could suffer the same sentiment of being abandoned by all other gods. So a mortal knew a gods loneliness, her terrible difference, the power of something dark.
Even as she thinks it, she fights a civil war within herself and her very nature; his blood entices her more thoroughly than anything ever has. It entices her because she wants more, and the word emerges in her own mind, an echo of Orestes.
She wants his Soul.
She wants to share it, know it, touch it. She wants to be a Keeper of someone aside herself. The sea buffets her and Boudika recognises that now they have drifted so far from the land it is a distant sight on the horizon, dipping and falling and disappearing with the violent, growing swell of waves. Boudika says nothing else. Her muscles tremble with fatigue, even as her expression reminds proud, defiant, etched in stone and copper.
"Speech." || @Tenebrae
start by wiping the blood off his chin
and pretend to understand
