the stars and sea sing to me
The sky burns red against your skin
The world we know turns in the wind
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The world we know turns in the wind
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Like a wild weed in summer, the sea girl’s daring within this new world flourished. Feeding upon boredom, nourished by the inherent wildness of her wandering blood, it lavished the gemstone filly in dreams anew. She woke often entangled in her silvery hair, unspooled from braids that smelled of salt and shoals; drenched in a tepid sweat that sang of pounding hooves upon shorelines, of silken fetlocks dancing through the lapping tide. Of what awaited her beyond a blue, wondrous horizon.
And no matter the potency of the ocean’s song, Aehra was a creature hewn of adventure, and even the too-long grass and the deep throng of forest shadows came to sing to her, a careful lure that tugged upon her opaline heart. Her eyes were youthful and wide: gemstone saucers that drank and drank, filled to the brim with glassy rainwater that reflected the depths of her boundless curiosity.
She was ablaze with life: a rare, winter bloom that learned feverishly to thrive beneath a summer sky.
And so, by a song of sunlight, Aehra succumbed to the insatiable allure of mountain streams and dewy fields. Daring to dance further from her Scholar mother, to let her fleetfooted steps send her careening toward stories untold, she learned to overwhelm the sonnet of soil with a tender symphony of the sea. Her contempt for solid land went unanswered, drowned, ironically, in the tide of her thirst for newness.
For either of the Seaborne’s mothers had been host to a life of adventure; to page upon page of tragedy, a mere line of which was quilled within the scars that marked her dappled skin. But Aehra wore them as a badge—a memory of a war she did not live.
And her opaline skin took kindly to the sunshine that filtered through the trees, kissing the seafoam spread of her speckled skin in shades of yellow as she, days after venturing further inland, now tiptoed through a deep copse of trees scarred with a dozen roads. They intertwined blindly with one another, like fingers of desperate lovers, and left her aimless to the intent of a vast, impenetrable forest.
Her hair caught upon branches; her gaze snagged by the intoxicating newness that surrounded her.
It took some time, but the forest of Delumine earned her smile. And it grew and grew, like the unfurling shadow of a crescent moon, as her heart heeded the trickling lull of water; its gentle lap upon a shallow shore; the richness of its humid scent.
Aehra’s steps quickened, blind to the leafy arms that stroked her skin and the bushes she shouldered gracelessly through, until her opaline hooves dipped beneath the rippling surface of a wondrous woodland oasis. It drank her in steadily, as though the water was the one that was parched, and the sea’s uncharted daughter smiled at her dazzling reflection. The wildness of her hair, the contentment of her eyes.
Until another ripple kissed her pasterns, drawing her gaze to the newborn shadows—spread upon the water, upon her, by the stretch of a mighty wing. Aehra thought of mahogany; of treebark dipped in resplendent, golden ichor. She thought of gods and of demons; of darkness and of light; and she stumbled back and out of her shallow haven.
Her lips parted to the taste of magic. She knew its flavor well, for she had been born to it—molded by it.
And so entranced was she by the sight of him, this stranger who stood smiling among the trees—as though he were one of them, as though the forest nymphs had claimed him as their gilt son—she did not notice the blooms he nurtured until their colorful petals kissed her knees.
Blue—blue.
Aehra laughed. A soft, tinkling, delighted sound. As bemused as she was naïve, as taken as she was startled. Were she a day younger, an hour more foolish, she might have believed she’d overlooked the flowers when first she’d stepped into the pond.
But Aehra knew better.
"Fecerunt haec tibi..." The boy would not understand, of that she was sure, as she breathed her awed words into the space between them. It took effort, courage, to tear her eyes away from the newborn flowers to meet his halcyon gaze.
To look upon the golden tines that crowned his brow, like a Hart among his Kingdom.
"Hello," her little heart sang as she spoke timorously, and Aehra was too wickedly curious to quell its pitter-patter.
He had shown her his gifts unabashedly, placed them upon a pedestal at her feet. Coupled with the naivety of her courage, only the breathlessness of her voice made her queries soft spoken.
"Can you make anything grow...?"
