The dream continues its frantic turn. Harsh reality comes pressing in with teeth and claws turning all to chaos. Wakefulness bleeds in through the ribbons of her broken dream.
Sereia’s control of her dream slips away as water does. It leaves her wet and numb from cold. She shivers, even as she watches the way the boy shakes his head. No, she doesn’t frighten him. Not even as her dream turns savage with a kelpie’s hunger? She is rousing, that strange and terrible beast within her. The kelpie’s magic can be like a siren’s song when it takes control of Sereia at last. So she looks to the boy as if he might be the last thing she sees upon her death (for that is what succumbing to her kelpie feels like… death).
The birds collide with the warm of his skin. He felt so real, so utterly real. But he is water now, slipping away from her grasp. She swims in water - it owns her - and she cannot catch him now. But it does not stop her lunging after him.
Sereia does, she falls forward like a child, reaching reaching reaching. But he is gone and she falls forward and down, down, down as the dream dissolves. The stone walls that hold his name, the floor that held her up and the bird wings that beat across her face - they all dissipate.
The kelpie tumbles into wakefulness. She rouses with a start, her cheeks wet, her breath a tangle in her throat. The girl gasps and grieves.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
