Over and over the strange coin turns within her grasp. Every engraving upon its face is unusual. Its weight and its touch are nothing like the currencies of Novus. Is it heavy, wicked deeds and stories of strange lands with stranger gods add to its weight within her grasp.
This girl is a magpie. Keenly she gathers things to herself. This coin is a trinket. It whispers to Sereia and she lets her imagination sink deep into the stories that gleam as roguish light across the coin’s bloodstained surface.
Blood.
Oh.
She looks upon those crimson stains. Her heart beats slowly, slowly, but it stirs at the sign of blood, however old. That is what starved beasts do; they grow desperate even for the oldest, most tasteless morsels. Her sharp teeth press together and when her golden eyes tip up to the strange woman, there is no fear within them. Though they are lovely, the sharpness of a kelpie’s hunger softened by lashes that lower shyly, they do not tremble as soft things might.
Amaunet’s magic breathes, it prowls in the space between them. It yawns and its teeth prick along Sereia’s slim torso. The magic clacks along Sereia’s ribs as a stick along railings. The kelpie feels that tapping magic. It is like a dark song to match the dark magic that swells in Amaunet’s chest. Sereia feels teeth, teeth upon the hard bones of her body. Is this what hers feel like? As they sink through flesh and bone and hold life within their grasp? It was so easy to snuff it out then. Sereia knows, her kelpie feels it. It twists in delight, it rouses - but then boys laugh ahead. Rowdy they shove through the crowd and Sereia’s eyes lift to watch them go.
Her kelpie does not rouse. She does not let it.
Soft is her sigh. Though it is not the sound of a girl but that of a monster groaning, hungering. There is not just one girl who wishes to feast tonight. Slowly Sereia blinks, that push and pull of her lids hypnotic. It rouses her from the deep pits of hunger and has her slipping her gaze back to the crimson mare.
Together they move, weaving through the crowd as if it were little more than the sea. Do any of us really need to do anything? Those words cut through the laughter, cut through the sounds of vendors selling their wares.
“Yes,” the Dawn girl says by way of an answer. “If we want anything at all then we always need to do something about it. Like wanting to live and needing to breathe in order to do so.” At that she takes a breath. Anything to live - though she starves, though she lets herself waste away. Such hypocrisy. Her lungs grow, filled with smoke and sugar-sweet air. They twinge with the sharpness of alcohol fumes.
Sereia says no more, for, as Amaunet said, it is as simple as that. The scarf brushes across her chest a shock of red more ostentatious than the droplets that nestle deep into the grooves of the coin. It is silken and merlot-dark in the late throes of the evening light.
Together they walk and Sereia is drinking in everything this strange place offers. The roar of the sea is replaced with the clack and rumble of hooves and wooden wheels over cobbled streets. “No. I am not from here.” The girl affirms and feels how the salt in her veins tries to pull her sea-ward. Beneath her forelock the girl’s gaze flits upward watching the mare who moves beside her. Her gaze is a contradiction. It hungers and yet it does not, it is sharp and yet soft, sweet and yet sour. “I am from Delumine and the ocean floor before that… You may live here now, but you have not always, have you, Amaunet?”
A pink tongue wets her lips and she leans, as if to reach, as if to taste the scent of a girl who passes too close, her blood running too hot. Slowly she leans back and sighs, closing her eyes tight, tight. She thinks of the coins instead - it is safer, even with their old, rusty blood stains. “And if you are from here, then you have travelled. Those coins are not from Novus. What tales do you keep hidden, Amaunet?”
@Amaunet
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
