He is a flash of shadow and gold in the crowd of Delumine. Just one look and she remembers him. One look upon the scythe of his black and gold-star horns and she is back before the statues with his quiet indifference and her confessions.
Wicked. Was what she has breathed out through her dark lips. Yet she went ever further and told him how she wished to banish her kind. It was a raw moment, shame filled her later, it still fills her now, but she cannot escape the truth of it. She despises herself, she despises all kelpies - even though she loves her sisters so deeply, so wholly. Sereia moves to him and her mind is full of tigers.
Tyger, tyger burning bright.
A poem she once read blooms into her mind. It is orange and full of fire. Her stride feels suddenly feline, suddenly more predatory than she has ever felt before. Her swan grace, her feline predation. It has been so long since she ate and she feels the prowling, howling hunger clawing at her empty stomach. Her kelpie gnaws upon her bones. Sereia ignores it. Make up hides her too-wide smile, still she pretends to not be the very creatures she swore she wanted banish.
In the forests of the night;
The swan-girl steps through the dark, ancient wood. Her skin is damp, so nearly dry, but just wet enough to turn her skin cool and soft as velvet. She drinks in the gold of him as she steps like molten gold, her blues a deep indigo in the shadows. He is looking out, as something else. Sereia edges closer and fools herself into thinking she does not stalk him. But her approach is silent, her slim legs stepping with hushed precision.
Sereia is nearly to him, when a wave of deepest darkness sweeps over her, over him. Her chin tips up to where a dragon swoops down out of the sky. It lands, with blood and gore hanging from its maw. She smells the metal, the violence. Her stomach turns. She should leave, but she has become reckless and desperate. Her yearning to be normal, just another land horse, runs deep as a river. Sorrow limns her in hazy summer light. She exhales a silver cloud that reaches for the leopard that leaps into a butterfly form.
Gods die too
The dragon says and Sereia gazes at it beneath the veil of her fringe. Slim and angular, underfed and wasting away, she steps toward her familiar stranger. The dragon’s words remind her of a man in Solterra, who accused her of eating gods. Yes she thinks, even gods die too.
But that is not what she says when she slinks to Vercingtorix’s side, at once a rabbit and yet a cat. Her eyes are a lovely dark ochre. “What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” She whispers to the golden man the final lines of the first verse. As she does her eyes drink in the dragon. The sea-girl cannot help but think there are 3 predators here, but she keeps her secrets her own and tips her gaze up to peer upon her familiar stranger. Her lips are lovely, shadowed and sweet as they lie in a line like a bow.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
