The wind howls like a song as she steps down the rough-grass banks onto the beach. She leaves footprints in the sand as she steps out, out toward the ocean. The sea is grey and angry as it pushes itself up upon the beach, breaking into foam that hisses as it retreats. Sereia listens to how it berates her for being gone so long. She smiles at the way it looks bleak and uninviting. Even in summer, the overcast sky casts an iron grey hue across the surface of the water.
It thrums like a living thing. It whispers into her veins and her nerves. Though she stands where the tide can only lick her toes, where her body is still, the only tranquil thing here, inside she is awakening. There is a crease across her brow, it speaks into her soul and the part of it that awakens and stirs. Her tongue grows wet and her eyes bright and feral. The ocean does not claim her, but it does set her body alight.
Tendrils of hair wrap around the curve of her slim throat and the wind tugs them this way and that. Her chin tips up and she takes a deep breath of the sea-salt air. She has been roaming for weeks, listening to the siren call of the earth, trailing woodland paths and sinking beneath the earth into caves that burrow deeper, deeper under ground.
The seaside wind tousles her hair, throwing locks across her eyes and the wet of her lips where they stick, salt-sweet. Nothing wipes the smile from her mouth, though its corners fall as a bird swooping low out of the sky. Down, down they turn as she feels belonging rising like a cry in her bones. It is whalesong, sad and yet eerily beautiful. Even Sereia who fights her ties to the sea, who tries to untangle the two entwined parts of her soul, can recognise the beauty of belonging.
But it is not a pining for the sea that brings her down to Terrastella’s windswept bay. Sereia would have lost herself in the inland hills and towns were it not for her sisters. She turns away from the bleak surf and feels dread and joy tangle in her veins. There is no need to hide her too-sharp smile now and she does not feel shy as the wind lifts her forelock from her eyes, her nose. Her sister already knows just what monster lies within Sereia. There is no hiding here. Her mouth, her wicked hunter eyes greet the light. Lovely, lovely, only a whisper of violence lingers there, but all Sereia can hear is how it shouts, wicked loud.
“Andi,” the Minn princess calls to where her sister stands above a kill. It was easier to look out to the sea and feel that uneasy belonging stir within her than it is to see her sister now.
Blood.
Sinew.
Bone.
Sereia cannot walk slowly enough, though she tries. It is a divine test, but Sereia has been training her life for these moments. She knows this torture. Her kelpie is chained. All of Sereia clinks with the shackles she will not remove. She cannot remember where she put the key. There is no escape.
Maybe the wind helps, maybe the sand has some strange magic because she arrives beside her sister sooner than she wishes. The girl presses her muzzle to her sister’s nape and studiously ignores the kill at their feet. Does Anandi hear how her sister holds her breath and avoids where blood blooms red upon Andi’s skin? Growing up together has exposed much between the sisters, there are no secrets here. Her stomach twists, she knows it dares to rumble. Her tongue is wet with hunger and the kelpie twists and turns and wants, wants, wants. But Sereia breathes slow, slow, exhaling and sipping air as if it is exquisite agony.
It is.
Yet the girl's smile has turned up its corners for her sister. Where sallow darkness once pressed itself between her lips, now daylight gleams along its length. “I have missed you,” the Minn girl whispers to her sibling. It is as if there is no corpse there, as if meat does not tinge the air with its alluring metallic scent. Agony. Agony. Blissful, terrible agony.
Sereia fills herself up with this reunion, she leaves no space for wanting or hungering for anything else. She looks to Anandi and studies her, remembering every detail of her sister’s body - anything to stop her kelpie turning to the feast below.
She forgets. She forgets.
By the gods she hungers.
@
again
~ Ariana
