As they sway towards the cliffside, where the sea beckons with boundless patience, Elena admits “I don't think I will ever quite understand men,” to which Anandi can only smile ruefully. Men, women, children, they weren’t terribly hard to figure out from the kelpie’s point of view. Everyone wanted something, the tricky part was figuring out what it was. That either came with hard work and experience, or (as in Anandi’s case, at least in her opinion) you were simply born with the natural gift of reading people.And then she asks “And what of women? Do we grow bold?” To which the answer immediately comes to mind: “Oh, women aren’t so simple.” Her eyes are a bright, laughing shade of green. “But sometimes yes.” Often times, in fact, the firelight and the wine made women angry, or hungry, or violent.
Anandi was often all three of those things. But here, tonight, with the sea breeze on her skin a constant comfort, she is bubbly and bright. “No need to apologise! It’s just… complicated,” the kelpie concedes with a soft laugh, tossing her mane from one side of her shoulder to the other. Revealed in the moonlight are three long, thin scars- claw marks. If anything they add another layer of intrigue to the mare’s nuanced beauty, although she is convinced otherwise. She does not quite realize it is the contrast of soft and sharp, smooth and rough; the enticing push and pull of her very attitude all take a beautiful woman and elevate her to-- Anandi.
“The first time we met, her dragon gave me this.”
It seems unnecessary to mention she had been in the process of drowning Lucinda at the time, but it might be garnered, by the small wicked smile curling like the blade of a sickle, that the exchange with the dragon was not completely one-sided.
But Lucinda is the last thing in Novus she wants to be talking about right now. She laughs freely as they talk by the sea, the wine in her blood making her feel warm and soft and something more like a girl made for laughing and less for,
well.
Crueler things.
(And yet. The sweeter she feels the more her kelpie wails, smothered by the velvet of inebriation, thrashing in the dark. It demands blood, and viciousness, and kindness of a different sort. The mercy of a clean kill- was there anything closer to god?)
She licks a stray drop of wine from her lips. “Your family, do you miss them? Are they in Beqanna?” She remembers in precise detail their first encounter when Elena had spoken of her homeland. Anandi had a knack for places, the feel and history of them. Maybe it was genetic, encoded generation after generation in the tiny spiral ladder that the body used as its blueprint. Or maybe it was just a personality trait. Regardless, she was always looking for a home, or else a place to fall back to. Minn kelpies could be vicious, but at their core they were hunters, not fighters. Challenged or pressured a certain way they would rather fall back to a safe place… and so she found herself always taking note of places to take shelter in a storm, underwater caves to hide, and foreign lands in case her people needed a place to flee to.
But ah, here comes an interesting question! “So tell me, Anandi, what secrets have you learned in our time apart?”
“Secrets, hmm?” Lashes bat innocently over eyes that gleam conniving. Should I tell you what they think of you, the paltry commonfolk who come to you for healing? How much they adore their golden-skinned newcomer? Should I tell you what rumors you incite, spreading yourself around Novus like a sweet sickness?
No. Of course not- Anandi did not want anyone to know how much she knew. It would not be prudent. She could share a small rumor, though, most of the court was already whispering about it. “Well, the blacksmith’s apprentice is infatuated with an-” impoverished swamp rat “Illati.” She laughs. “It’s quite sweet, really, except his sire is convinced the girl cast a spell on the boy.”
How typical, for a stallion to forget what it felt like to be a boy.
corrupts absolutely,
or almost.
A N A N D I
@
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
☾
