We call them blood blossoms - the trees themselves are carnivorous.
Sereia turns her sunbright eyes from the horse who slipped from the trees with the satin gleam of a raven’s wing. The trees welcome her gaze as they cast their petals down into the flowing river. On those petals roll where water should be the tide yet crimson is the river that meanders on with ever increasing numbers of red, red, petals.
Each tree is dark and tall as a guard along the bank. Their gnarled arms reach out over the petal-river. They seem quite beautiful as they weep their crimson fronds away. Sereia’s eyes are wide and grave as she studies them. Each tree is achingly beautiful, their white bark gleaming nearly gold in the setting sun. Was it their hunger for blood that made their petals run red? If she stepped close would their beauty turn to savagery as they consumed her flesh and bone?
Her golden hair falls across her eyes. The azure ends of her hair reach down for the river’s surface as if to remind it that it should be running wet and blue, blue, blue. But nothing is normal here - least of all Sereia. Is that not why she has come?
She is so like the trees, is she not? Her tongue craving blood, her stomach craving meat. She is as beautiful as them, she is refining the art of appearing… normal. The girl hides her too wide smile behind small, shy grins and the veil of her silken hair. She tamps down her wild hunger with a grip like iron. Her kelpie is fettered within her angular, slim body. They are all starving, her body wilting like a flower without the sun, without water.
But oh, her guilt. Her heart, her soul cannot cope with the killing, with the blood, the violence.
She turns away from the beautiful, hungry trees and looks down to the black horse below. Could they sprout wings and fly up to her? Their body is raven black and cool, gleaming blue. They are a raven as they watch her, as they tell her of the feasting trees. But she does not see feathers atop their body and she wants more of the words upon their tongue. She wants to learn of the beautiful trees who hunger like her. They are trees who do not deny themselves, nor grow as angular, as thin, as she.
The girl was birthed in water. Though she loathes it, it is where she thrives. She casts the man a long, long look, hesitant, wary, before then she steps from the waterfall’s edge. The drop is not far, but it is enough that she feels like a god falling out of the sky. The petals greet their fellow hunter and they draw her down, down into the crimson pool that does not wet her skin, that does not press water into her gills.
Petals brush her body like butterfly wings. It is surprisingly easy to swim in a river of flowers. So the kelpie drifts towards the raven horse who stands upon the lower bank. She rises from the pool and the petals cascade from her slim torso as water should. Sereia is dry and the flowers are silent as they land gently upon each other.
Already Sereia has hidden her too-wide mouth from the stranger’s sight. Already she keeps her golden eyes shrouded by the thick wave of her lashes. Already she has sought to forget how she must have seemed rising out of the pool: gilded and terrible with ruby petals falling like blood from her body. It has felt too right to be bathing in crimson; her heart, her soul recoils.
The kelpie brushes past the ebony stranger. She holds her breath, she dare not smell how their body tastes upon the air across her tongue. The water-horse presses her lips up to a water-flower. Its petals are small fountains, wetting the earth at its roots. All around the raven-boy and kelpie-girl is a forest of fantastical anomalies. The island turns herself into something strange, something wonderfully dangerous and cradles at her heart a kelpie who is deathly beautiful, sweetly horrific.
Sereia aches.
She tips up her gaze to study the one with raven skin who told her of the hunting trees. She smiles a small, small smile. It is beautiful as it curls her lips upward - the arc of the rising sun. “Where are you from?” Sereia breathes, she yearns. “To know of trees that feast...” She does not finish.
Her gaze tips up, her slender neck extending, to better peer beneath her forelock at the trees atop the waterfall. She returns her gaze to him after a moment, after a long and aching moment, “Do you think they want to eat meat?” Sereia whispers small and sad into the space between them and, one might think that she does not ask her stranger about the trees at all. “Do you fear them?”
@
dark and deep
I offer you
eternal sleep.
~
