The dragon laughs and Sereia wonders if the roar she hears from the earth is all just echo. She thinks, if she turns her gaze from him, she will see how the earth kneels for him. Trees bent low, stars pulling themselves loose out of the sky. For what else could stir them but the will of a god?
It was only a short while ago that she had asked her sister on a whim - a foolish, impulsive whim - what she thought dragons might taste like. That awful thought is still there, her kelpie feasting upon the delectable idea and finding it sweeter, sweeter each night her eyes close and her hunger begins to gnaw. Her familiar stranger is casting his eyes over the parts of her that are most angular. Sereia watches him and wonders what he thinks. Does he hear how her kelpie sings a siren song out from betwixt her ribs?
Her smile is small (and measured as always). He does not say the words for him, when she looks upon the dragon. Neither does she say it entirely for the dragon, Damascus. Her motives are purely selfish. She wonders if she might ever be able to see the beauty of a predator or in herself.
“I didn’t.” She says at last and strips her gilded gaze from where it burns upon the great dragon. She sets the sunlight of her eyes upon the man as gold as her. “But I am glad to hear you love words like I do. I pick up books in my wanderings.” When I explore boat wrecks at the bottom of the sea. Such honesty finds no place upon her deceptive tongue. She hates herself for it, even as she values her ability to lie. Sereia does not know, as she watches her familiar stranger, how he too is economical with his truths. They are more alike than just the gold of their bodies. They might be as horrified as each other to learn the sordid truths they keep hidden.
A girl after my own heart.
Sereia laughs.
And aches.
She is not as good as this stranger at concealing her heartbreak. Her self-loathing runs damagingly deep. She is cracked earth waiting for the rains of self-respect to come and give her life.
She aches.
She stops laughing that small sardonic laugh
Sereia does not think she could ever hold the heart of another. Never will she be worthy of that. When, oh when, did she take his flippant, passing comment and turn it into something so deep?
He lights a fire and it beckons her in. Sereia edges toward it and feels the salt of her skin grow dry and coarse. Fire is her elemental enemy. Water is everything she should be glad to be and represents everything she longs not to be. So she edges closer to the flames, fascinated, adoring. It hurts her. She thanks it.
The dragon lowers its head and she does not flinch (as a good creature of prey would) when it watches her. Instead, curious, she reaches toward it. The blood, the flesh, it all still dangles wet and red between its teeth. She is a veloceraptor before a t-rex. She blinks slowly and sighs soft like a dream. Slowly she withdraws and licks her lips and pretends a part of her does not taste phantom blood. She pretends a part of her did not wish to draw a piece of tattered flesh out of his mouth and remind herself what fresh blood and meat tastes like.
It has been growing ever darker and the fire-shadows dance between the trees. “Tell me something about yourself that no one else knows.” She asks her familiar stranger and longs to press her cheek against his dragon’s. Her eyes are slow in the twilight as they blink up and down. Lazy lashes hang heavy over her golden eyes. “I bet you did not expect to share your fire and yourself with me tonight.”
It should have been an apology, so why wasn’t it?
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
