This keening soul;
As one girl leaves the ocean, it lures another one in.
The waves undulate in dance, spray whispering like a dancer’s dress. Upon the sea air is a siren’s call. Its keening tangles itself around the girl who steps into its frigid embrace. From her steaming place upon the beach, Leto turns her gaze as the sea sings her deep-blue song. She watches as the girl, slim as a fae, steps out into the lapping water. It lips at her slim knees, her shadowed hocks. It gurgles childlike laughter and sends shadows twisting in its cold, iron depths.
The trinkets on the girl’s antlers gleam like moonlight. The catch the light and reflect the glow of Leto’s scoldin skin back to her. Ah, the Ilati woman glows starbright where she stands upon the shore and watches the sea seduce another.
I am to drown Leto once whispered, her voice an anguished whimper in the king’s ear. Now she watches as the sea seduces another. Closer, closer! its waves rise and beg with their soft spray. Will the girl rise from her drowning as Leto did? Is it fate that draws the girl out to sea, runs its seabreeze fingers into her bejewelled locks and tugs, tugs, tugs her out into the open water.
Wild and wicked upon the beach, the kelpie turns her body, a sacrament of black sky and liquid starlight. The keening of the sea captures her attention and she watches as the girl stands, as if waiting for the siren that will lure her in, in, in. But then, revelry comes as the girl’s head tips back. Her antlers reach down with jewel adorned fingers toward her spine. Leto sends her white-hot eyes searing up the slender column of the stranger’s neck.
She speaks, this girl who throws her head back as though she is an offering to the sea. (And the ocean rises for her. It reaches out with its soaking touch and turns the girl’s skin black in the bleak half-light). Leto feels it. Ah! Yes! It sinks in to her bones, her soul. She is moving, even before the stranger’s words are a song in her ears. The sands run away beneath her limbs as the girl moves tribal, wild, dangerous across the beach. She is scoured by the seabreeze. It tangles her mane into a knot of feral black roots, it sets the salt upon her skin until she is sticky, until the sigils she painted upon her body gleam and crack and seem to speak their ancient litanies out into the open water. Leto is a song of sea and sky and savage soil. The beach yields to her. The sand did not listen, though she sea warned it. Leto steps from beach to water and the liquid hisses as it shatters upon her slender legs and up her curving abdomen. The ocean runs itself along her painted runes, it washes the ones it can reach away into nothingness. Water erases all, if given enough time.
“Who is hungry?” The kelpie asks as she draws near and sets her gaze upon the girl. Her lids are heavy, the salt-slick lashes pressing upon her cheek and then up. Leto is midnight sliced open by channels of mapping light. She could be the start of the universe, the beginning of everything. Her runes whisper she is, she is. Feline, every inch of her a wicked grace, Leto reaches for the girl, moves to touch her lips to Torielle’s bared throat. But the air shudders in the space where lips and neck do not meet. Gods the girl is warm and alive. Her heart is a rhythm to which Leto could dance. The Ilati has become a celestial thing. Star-fire burns within her, she becomes a reckoning star and the ocean cries out for her.
Her lips tip into a smile and Leto’s head tips back too, a mirror of the antlered girl. She laughs and her voice is the waves. Bones chime in her hair, the breath of magic and portents yet to be told. Torielle trembles, her bones touched by a cold that does not relent. Leto hears their rattle and through the low of her laugh, the rumbles sleek and low like a lion, seductive as a creature made to lure, to hunt, to hold, she asks, “The sea bites like ice. She is always hungry.” Only then does her chin tip down and she gazes beneath the thick fan of midnight salted lashes.
@Torielle
Anyone! | "speaks" | notes:
