They are quite different, she and him.
She is a princess with a name that befits one.
He a boy of the dusty streets with a name of his stature.
Yet she finds his name beautiful. It is a name of the earth. Even those rolled up by sea waves grow grass and flowers and warm their backs in the heat of the sun. So that is why Sereia says it, why she lets her tongue learn the melody of it, the simple sweetness of such a name.
There are many things to fall in love with in her dreamscape and Sereia so easily succumbs to them all. To the way the flowers glow like fluorescent candles, to the way the walls gleam with unexpected light. The way birds fly with razor wings -
The way he is soft and warm to touch. The way he smells of midnight deserts, dusty roads and summer smiles. He may think that he is boring. He may think that there is nothing of note about him. Yet to her, to a girl used to craving flesh, and knowing all too well the sound, swell, wash, taste of the sea - Dune is nothing like any of those things. Sereia is glad, she is so utterly glad.
Not once does the sea-girl think her interloper could change his appearance. Not once does she think to ask her dream to change him either. If he asked her what he would change about himself, she would breathe ‘nothing at all’ against his skin.
But he is retreating and she is surprised. She reaches as if she can hold him just a moment longer. Yet he slips away as easily as water between grasping fingers. It might not have come as a surprise, if she had heard the way his breath snagged in his throat and his body quivered at her touch. However, Sereia missed the signs and the dropping of her heart within her breast, the tumbling of her stomach, deep deep with rejection feels so much like falling. She withdraws as fast as he, her nape arching, swanlike, beautiful. But the action is well rehearsed and ever so swift. In response her forelock falls across her lips, a veil to hide whatever monstrosity he has seen. Has her kelpie returned so soon?
Her lips are downturned, her delicate smile fled. The light teases along the soft of her mouth but it cannot draw a smile from the kelpie-girl now. She has not changed; she is still the master of her dream. Dune still smells of desert dust and too much sun and her kelpie is still far gone. Yet she fears and the anxiety is deep, her self-loathing creeping, creeping into her dream. It looms like sorrowful shadows in the corners of her resplendent cave. The dreamwalker looks for shadows and they come, as all inevitable things do.
“I am sorry.” The girl is whispering. Her earlier delight is nothing but a sweet aftertaste upon her tongue. She keeps her hair as a protective veil between them. She hides in her sunset gold and sea blue skin.
The girl does not startle when his muzzle bumps the curve of her breast - for what does a kelpie have to fear from a horse? She is the hunter here though she loathes herself for it. Despite she does not startle, it is now her breath that snags in her throat. It is her heart that flutters at the touch. She still dares not smile, but tilts her hear to better watch him beneath the arc of her lashes.
“Do you fear me?” She asks and dares not reach out to touch him again. The birds take flight, angry, furious. They cut like her teeth, they fight like her kelpie does as she drags her prey down, down, down. Her heart rattles in her throat, as if her worse self comes to catch her, to settle itself back beneath her skin where it belongs. “Can you not stay as you are?” She asks desperate, her eyes wide. “You are the first I have ever been able to stand near… I do not want to hurt you.” her lips are a down-turned bow, her eyes wide and pleading. The darkness is looming, her dream turning anxious, turning less than perfect.
It always ended in a tragedy.
“I am sorry. I am sorry.” She breathes, she weeps. He was perfect, her dream was perfect and reality presses itself into her dreams with sharp, sharp teeth and a ravenous hunger.
@
~Anna Funder
