Your eyes are very yellow.
If they are looking at her eyes then they are not noting the way her smile is too, too wide. Sereia blinks slowly and for once does not shy from the way the stranger watches her. The gold of her irises are framed by the black of her lashes.
...Your eyes are very yellow...
She wonders if the yellow and the black combined might make her gaze look sharp and poisonous as a wasp?
Ah.
She looks away at last, sadness and shame blooming deep within her breast. But then, then the newcomer talks of being eaten and her gaze drifts back. It settles upon him with all the danger of a wasp upon an open palm. She does not know whether she waits, keen or fearful, in this stranger’s gaze. Yet she waits all the same, to hear this tale of trees so much like her.
In her ears is the sound of their words and the ever so light rustle of red silk petals rippling out across the pool as water should. The water flowers gurgle like merry streams. Her feet are wet. The earth swallows them. She wonders what lies beneath the grass. If she sank through it, would she fall into the sea?
Suddenly, then, their thoughts match. She looks for the signs of bark teeth upon the stranger. She listens for the grumbling sounds of ravenous trees digesting their meals. She thinks of being swallowed whole and sinking into the sea. Her eyes close. This is what she runs from, from creatures like her. She looks to the trees, their gnarled limbs extending toward her. They beckon strangers closer.
“Is this forest as hungry as the one that once ate you?” Sereia whispers as her kelpie rolls over. She shivers and shakes. Sereia trembles as fragile as the crimson leaves upon the trees.
Viasyni.
“It is a beautiful name they called you.” Her voice is a whisper, a brush of grasses over summer flowers. Sea salt settles upon her lips and across her tongue. “Swallowed by the land and by the sea..” She wonders, her voice trailing off, swallowed by the breaths of the island. It inhales with the breeze, exhales with birdsong. “How did you survive… I think you are not made to die.”
Slowly her gaze gilds the stranger. She turns them into gold beneath her watch as if she is Midas and they a treasure blooming at the touch of her magic. But really, Sereia possesses no magic. She has never yearned for it. She smiles and her magic-less body, possessed only by a kelpie’s wiles, steps graceful and sleek beyond the stranger. Their body is warm, their flesh sweet. Sea-salt still clings to their body, the lovely depths of the woodland still echoes in the texture of the stranger’s skin. “Can I call you Viasnyi too?”
I do not think I am afraid.
Her eyes close. Dark lashes are dusted and weighted with relief. Joy curls her lips. Shyly she dips her chin so her smile is obscured, yet her eyes tip up to peer at him beneath the thick, kohl of her lashes.
“I am not afraid of them. Only of myself.” Slowly she turns her gaze back to the stranger. “But I do not think i need to fear around you… You who seems to survive everything.”
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
