“Yes.” She says without a moment of hesitation. Her eyes close and she can see a pair of golden eyes and a body of sunset orange cut through with elegant bending stripes. It stalks feral and hungry, its beauty in its power. It was made to hunt and to kill, like Sereia herself. They even share the same colour eyes. But a tiger does not know the cost of eating meat. It does not know the horror it inflicts. It eats to survive.
She knows better. It is why her sides are too slim, her body too angular. Her stomach is famished, only meat can sustain her and she would rather die than eat again but… always her kelpie ensures it will survive. Always she pushes it to the point of near death and it drags them bath through a bath of meat and blood.
Heavy, dark lashes close over the blooming hurt in her gaze. “I might like to be a tiger.” Sereia muses as if she is caught up in a dream world where she can say anything and it will never escape because it is only her, and sometimes Dune. Her smile is small, high upon her fantastical dream. “To just do what it takes to survive.” Her head tips to him, her eyes seeking his through the shadows and the twinking glow of torchlight. She holds him there, her grasp delicate, until he turns and leads her along the meandering path.
The swan-girl follows him her small feet into his. She looks and wonders what it might be to just be normal. She keeps her distance from him, always. He moves as if he has no fear in the world. Sereia drinks up his mood, his quiet casual calm. She does not taste the underlying bitterness - a fatal flaw, a twist of something impure. Who could hate her more than herself? She does not taste bitterness, see the darkness in his gaze, the twist of his lips, the way he wonders, wonders. If you knew the truth, you could never loathe her more than she loathes herself, Torix.
How does she choose? Who should be banished? “I guess, the truth is that I would banish them all if I could, I just love some too much…” Her heart catches in her chest. Pain shoots through her neck and her throat closes on her confession. Sereia swallows and closes her eyes, still trailing him. She taps in to the music, into the twinge that twists its way through her veins. “Love changes things.” Though she is behind him and many shadows lie between them, her whispered words are for his ears alone. They reach him, just as quietly, softly, tentatively and painfully spoken as when they left her lips.
She hears him stop and her eyes at last flit open and set themselves upon his favourite statue. Her gaze trails from the bejeweled dagger lain at its feet, up and up its long, muscled limbs to where bronze foil meets ebony stone. The horse is leonine, brave and savage, beautiful and feral. A shiver rocks its way down the kelpie’s spine. Sereia feels the monster roll within her, stretch languidly and purr against the bars of her ribs.
How she wishes she had never opened her eyes… Slowly she breathes and turns to gaze at him. He is still drinking in the statue, so she takes him in in turn. Every sip of his skin is as gold as her, the hue of his eyes akin the warmest seas, the curve of his horns as lethal as scythes. He is beautiful in that savage way. Upon her tongue, the taste of sweet and salty. “It is beautiful.” Sereia murmurs, of him, of the statue. Her blood surges salt through her veins and as her heart surges faster, she can hear the roar of the ocean in her ears. “Honest.” She breathes his reason back to him. Something within her twinges. When is she ever honest? Her whole life is a lie, anything to escape her true nature. “How is this more honest than the water horse before?” Then, softer, quieter, a lambs bleat from a lion’s maw, “Why is honesty important to you?”
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
