Sereia lets the fall of her forelock obscure the curve of her mouth. Too long, too wide as it is. She listens to him, but her eyes are upon the flames and the darkness they fend off with their merry leaping. The air is full of the stranger’s murmurs and the crackling of the fire.
He talks of fear. He talks of becoming the thing you fear… The water-girl does not lift her gaze from those hot flames. Her skin is parched, it pulls tighter across her bones, even more than normal. She knows all too well of what he speaks, she just wishes that she might have had that vision of what she was. Unlike him, it was not a case of becoming. From the moment she was born Sereia has been a monster. In the womb she was already a beast.
There are no words she can offer him. No answer for what he has said. Rather, the kelpie just sits with his words and drowns deep in her own sorrow. Deeper and deeper until it is not water that drowns her, but grief as thick and heavy and rough as sand.
What would she make from her dreams? Is there anything she would pull out. Yes, that is why she revealed that small secret. The small one that was the key to the secret that would undo her - her greatest secret of all. How could she tell this stranger of Dune and why she wants to pull him from her dream is because he is the only one she can get close to. The only one who does not smell alive and sweet and ripe to taste.
Sereia swallows down the desire that rises within her. “I would bring out someone who is different. Easier to be around than other people.” And that is all she gives him. Now is no longer the time for more words. She dares not give him the chance to ask her anything more lest she be exposed, less he learn what he really sits beside. Repulsion blooms within her stomach. It makes her ill.
With a smile upon her lips she stands. And whispers small and fragile, “Thank you for the company and the fire. I should go but I shall look out for you again.” Sereia is not a kelpie then, but a dove, a swallow startled, swirling, escaping. She flees, but not like she is running. Her escape is slow, deliberate. She abandons the man and his dragon beside their fire and slinks into the darkness. Running, running, until her blood is a roar within her veins, until the burn of hunger and want are smothered down to mere embers.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
