She wades through the shadows between the lit lamps. She steps from golden circle of light to golden circle of light and stops only when she reaches the next statue. Each one has siad something to her. Some were quiet as they spoke and yet others cried out their messages, loud, loud into the night. Their voices so loud it turned her veins to marble, it sent shivers rocking through her nerves.
The night marks her different. It watches the Delumine girl and lays moonlight along her golden spine. It bathes her in silver as she stops to study each and every statue. The darkness lapped at her slim ankles. Its touch was as cool as the sea. But this night, she banishes the sea from her body. She bathed in the river until all the salt was gone from her skin. Then she bathed in honey and milk until the salt of her turned sweet.
Upon her face she applied makeup down along her cheeks until her smile was made smaller, more normal. She vowed to not smile this night, except for the smallest one, a barest hint. She is not far from a vow of silence either - anything to hide her too-wide smile. Sereia would hunt a magician down if ever she heard one might be able to rid her of the monstrous beast within her.
Her hair washed. She lets it curl about her face and down the smooth column of ehr throat. Where every part of her is too-thin, too-angular, her hair is thick and curled. From its gnarls she removed every trinket of the sea until just the pearls and meadow flowers remain. Only once she has erased every part of the kelpie from her body does she think herself ready.
She walks amidst the statues, watching the moonlight play across the many coloured stones. The first… oh the first. She can nearly hear its scream, she can nearly feel how it might thrash between her jaws. Sereia has killed many like this, feeling their bodies fight, hearing their screams, their screams…
A shiver sets her bones trembling and quietly she moves on, away, away from the horrors of her past. The kelpie wanders past statue upon statue. Each is beautiful, each resonates within her but none, none reach into her breast and clasps her soul as the hippocampus does. It is black, black as ebony. Its scales are silver moonstone and the moonlight baptises it. The statue watches her with eyes set rigid, she feels teeth along her spine across her throat. Her kelpie stirs, fierce and wicked. It presses against her skin, feline and wicked. In the girl’s ears is a siren song of laughter. Her kelpie sings like a storm, she breathes like the tide. She would make Sereia dance with her terrible ocean song.
She makes to move, after too long standing, but the man in front of her turns. He is as gilded as she. Sereia is as quiet as a doe. Already the honey upon her lips is mixing with the salt of her skin. All this night is turning into contradictions. She does not know that before her a hunter, a hater of kelpie’s stands. He beckons her closer, his voice like satin. Into his net (does he know he cast one out when he stood and welcomed her in?) the kelpie falls.
For all her makeup, for all her efforts to rid the sea from her body, her soul. He sees past it all. Yet she knows nothing about how he tastes the sea, hears its call within his ears. Slowly she steps up until she is level with him. Beneath the veil of her hair she gazes up to him. Up through lashes thick with wicked, dark kohl. There is something wild about her, it is there in her too-slim body, in the way her feral hunger battles across every inch of her sunset skin.
He might hate her, hate all that she stands for. But can he ever hate her more than she hates herself? “It is wicked.” She declares of the statue, of her kelpie, as moonlight dances maliciously across the statue’s ebony skin.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
