He is silent for so long that she thinks she might turn away and settle to sleep beside the fire that dances in his eyes. But it is exactly his eyes that stop her from doing so. They are dark and full of thought. The smile upon his lips is small and contemplative. It does not reach his eyes and the dark abysm that is there beneath the golden flames.
So she waits and lets the heat of the fire burn off what river water is left upon her body. Her body becomes dry and tight, the salt becoming rough, itchy. She should not like the fire, her body does not. But Sereia is a sum of parts. She is not just a body, she is animated by a soul and a heart. Her soul does not wish to be what she is and her heart is in love with her own self-hatred. They keep her in place. She does not even lean away from the heat, not even when her traitorous mind begins to fill itself with fantasies of cool sea waters.
At last he tells her a tale. It is full of sad, dark words told with a young voice that still remembers so vividly, as if he were still a child. But he is not and he never went to his father. Sereia holds his gaze when he turns to her. She lets the fire hiss between them. If she listened closely, she might hear how it hissed and crackled and laughed its ember warning at the golden man and his great dragon. She is a kelpie. How can you not see it? I see the way her skin dries and cracks, like a fish. How can you not? Wake up!
The fires warning spits between them and like him, it feels like an age passes before she speaks. “And why did you not go to him?” Sereia asks slow and small. She might as well have been whispering to the fire, for it holds every piece of her attention now.
The silence descends again, lazy and content as a cat. It curls between them as the night slumbers above, below, around and about. “I wish I could pull things, people, from my dreams.” Sereia whispers.
And that is all she says for it feels too desperately revealing, too utterly ridiculous, to tell him how in her dreams is the only person she can be near and not want to taste, to consume… She looks to the dragon and his bloody maw, full of meat. Her stomach clenches tight, agonizing. Control slips from her grasp as if her tether has become fine as silk, ready for breaking.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
