The child weeps still. His cries shout across the cobblestone street, ricocheting off buildings. Yet Sereia’s gaze is full of gold on ebony. The colours as startling as a bee sting.
Their collision had been rough, jagged. His body had felt blistering against hers. The scent of dust and sun and gilded gold. Everything about this man was hot from his skin, to his scent to his temper.
How much a fool he makes her. How he crushes her with a look. So swiftly she feels childish in the way she had stared at him - the gold of his blood - so much like ichor. SHe had thought him a god. Yet there is nothing divine about him.
Her heart is a fretting gazelle within her breast. It flees and her blood surges like a storm through her veins. His words had come like silk, but they steal the breath from her lungs as if he struck her.
There is still a siren song in her breast, it keeps her kelpie close, close beneath her skin. “How dare you.” Sereia breathes brackish as the water in which she was birthed. Horror twists within her gut yet the kelpie in her bones laughs like a lioness. She slides along Sereia’s ribs, it is her eyes who hold his, tight as Icarus might have clung to his melting feathers. Her moments are brief, when she is set free, so she relishes them, clings to them. Uses every second.
She limns Sereia in fire. Sets her skin aglow with a vitality she staunches. “You know nothing of me,” The words tumble from her lips like a leonine growl, yet her nape arches graceful as a swan. Few have ever realised she is a kelpie so fast. And even fewer have ever struck her as he does. Still she feels raw with his words, the sharp prickle of tears gathering hot and anguished behind her eyes. She does not let them fall but tips her chin up, until her hair falls back, the ugly line of her lips exposed. She moves like a dancer, her body gilded in gold. All could be beautiful, it should be beautiful. Yet she is a cacophony of sharp angles and endless anguish. Sereia lets herself gleam, famished and ugly before him. “I would rather die before I eat anything like you.” Self-hatred and ire are kerosine in her veins. She feels like petrol and he the spark. A part of her longs to burn and scourge the monstrous side of her out.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
