The sand had crunched as she walked. Its fine granules of crushed diamonds and pearls glitter strangely in the light. They sound beneath her feet like crushed bones between her teeth. Then there is the sea she stands in. It is warm like blood and thick like it too. It rolls more silently than it should and the air is filled less with salt than the smell of metal and ichor. Though the waters are blue, the setting sun paints it gold. Which god did she bleed in her dream?
The girl closes her eyes and thinks of the strange Solterran man whose tears were blood. Whose words cut her like a knife. What would her sisters think of her now? The land was making her soft like the petals of a flower but Sereia did not regret it.
The beach is beautiful, strange and bathed in luminous yet ebbing light. The sky is turning to a bruise, as deep as the sores upon Sereia’s heart. Her soul feels the ache of a life spent misshapen, just to fit within the body in which it was so ill-placed. Is there any part of her that feels connected to another?
It is a melancholy dream that wraps its sullen arms around her sleep addled mind. It is quiet, but for the birds that drift above like wheeling shadows. Their cries are the wail of children or maybe like sirens calling from the deep. To her kelpie the sound is arousing. It is one of innocence, danger and violence, it years for it, for an easy meal. The dream is beautiful. The dream is a nightmare, her kelpie prowling along its edges, singing in Sereia’s bones.
Her eyelashes flutter shut. They have only just closed when he speaks. Sereia. Startled, the girl looks away from her strange sea and up to where he stands. The beach was empty to start, she knows it was, yet here he is looking as if he has always been here. The boy looks like he belongs here better than she.
Dune.
It is not enough to think his name. It comes tumbling from her lips, first as a tentative question and then more boldly, more filled with delight. “Dune.” Her smile comes bright and more beautiful than the dusted jewels upon the beach. She turns to him in the silent sea, she is moving to him, keen, delighted. Until she remembers how her first dream shattered, how it turned vicious and wicked at her kelpie’s call. He changed, he fled, he saw her soul deep sorrow.
She stops, disgraced, embarrassed. Blood flushes hot in her cheeks. “Of course I remember you.” The swan girl murmurs, her nape arched graceful and fine. How can i not? Sereia wants to say. You were the first person I could be close to and not want to… to kill. “I cannot forget you.” Her confession falls like the twilight. It tumbles from her aching lungs like a wave spilling up upon the beach. The sound of her breath is louder than the surf at her feet.
Her dream makes him different this time. Bolder, brighter, the distance between them closes as he says he has something for her. She watches the way he moves, shyly, secretively. Her dream bends for him, the air bears a new smell now. It is a scent of bending, twisting, forming magic. It lies sour and sweet across her tongue. She leans in, curious, yearning, wanting.
A desert rose.
No longer does she know if her dream is at her control, or his. Dune is more present than the first time they met. He is bolder, brighter, more solid, like flesh and blood. If she touched him, would it be like waking? And the flower. Oh this strange rose of mineral, with petals pointed and solid. It is beautiful. She tells him so, with awe dusting her lips and mineral light glimmering in her eyes. “Where did you find it?”
Its edges are rough beneath her touch, but she touches it, letting herself feel every imperfect, perfect petal. It is rough and smooth and so much like a rose and yet nothing like it at all. “Thank you.” She whispers at last, when no piece of it has been spared from her awe-struck gaze. Her smile fades until at last, with effort, she lifts her gaze from the rose. “Will you keep it? So that I might find it again. I do not want it to be lost when I wake up.”
Dune steps closer again, his body warm as the hazy sun kissing the sea. Sunset dances across his skin, capturing its reds, setting him aglow like an ember. Sereia might have noticed if she was not looking at the rose, trying to work out which parts of the rose reminded him of her - the sharp petals, like teeth? Or its rose gold colour? Or the carvings of the earth they saw when he showed her his home, hot and sweltering and so alive. She can nearly feel the dust against her salt-slick skin.
“I am glad you came back.” She says and gazes up at him beneath her lashes. Her smile is rueful and too, too wide. The salt-girl hides it beneath her hair, secreting it away with the fluttering twist of her stomach at the rose he gave her. Her nose tucks into her chest, like fingers curling into a fist, anything, anything to stop her desire to touch him again and remember what it was like to be able to touch and not rip.
@
~Anna Funder
