He comes through the verdant light. The dark of his body drinks in the forest’s glow. Sereia’s smile stays, though it falters. She dips her crown and the curtain of her forelock falls forward, across her face. It casts a shadow across her lips, hiding that too-wide smile. When might she ever stop her bid to hide herself? When might she ever stop craving meat?
The woodland is full of lovely things this day. She picked at the grasses, their sweet taste nice, but, oh, it is nothing to the taste of meat. Yet she schools herself to enjoy it. She makes herself enjoy the taste of grass as much as the flowers she plucks from the forest floor. As she wanders she weaves the flowers into her mane. Already her hair is adorned with trinkets of the sea, small secrets she has found deep within its crushing blue. The flowers add colour, vibrant hues of earth and sea.
She pauses from her weaving, her smile growing small, flower petals tumbling to the floor. He calls himself the Warden and how ill-schooled is she in courtly business! “What does that mean?” Sereia asks, her voice the sigh of the sea, the song of the lapping river at its banks. “Forgive me. I am from here, I have just not engaged with the court yet much…”
Her golden eyes peer up, up, up to the canopy above. It is emerald and splintered with light. “I am too much of an adventurer.” She says with a smile and a shrug of a too slim shoulder. Slowly the girl steps back as he steps closer. Turning her face she meets the breeze as it breathes in through the trees. She keeps herself away from where the wind might carry his scent to her. Anything to keep her kelpie resting, anything to not awaken it with the smell of meat. “My name is Sereia.”
Slowly her eyes tumble down from the canopy of trees and settle upon him. He is as dark as midnight, the flashes of white across his skin as bright as snow. The glint of his glasses catch her eyes and remind her of a pair she found amidst a wreck at the bottom of the sea. Her eyes trail over the downward curve of his lips. Disdain darkens the lines of his face. “You seem unhappy.” The girl muses and carefully steps into the light, the smallest of distance closed between them. Beneath the wash of her forelock she studies him as if he were a sculpture. Her eyes trail along his feathers as if she wonders what it might be to carry wings the likes of his.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
