Blood drip, drip, drips.
Cloudy, vacant eyes stay still, still, still, watching nothing at all.
Footsteps lead out and out and out, down onto the beach.
Corpses are left like stepping stones, like clues upon a treasure hunt.
She leaves blood like a trail between her corpses.
It began with a rabbit, but that was never enough, not for a kelpie starved. Especially not one who had grown so thin, so desperate it could barely run its hunger along her ribs like a stick along railings. A loud racket to say I am here and you are killing us.
But that was always her goal: to kill them.
Not the corpses, no, she wanted them alive, she valued their lives above her own. No, she wanted her own death, her kelpie’s death because she knew that this would happen. The Binge, the frantic, wild hunger that was like a hurricane in her veins, unstoppable, unrelenting.
She sobs as she eats, tears falling upon exposed meat. Tears that try to wash the blood from her lips, cleanse her from the violence of her nature. They try to purify her of this binge. But there is nothing that can purify Sereia. Nothing has ever stopped these moments.
Wasting away, she turns from an angel of famine into an angel of death. But at least, when she feasts, the deaths are quick, but… oh, there are so many.
It began with the rabbit, and then the fox, but the fox was not enough. In its open ribcage she saw her sister’s eyes, gleaming as she offered her own fox carcass to Sereia to share. Still famished, already guilty and panicked she fled the fox. Then, there was the fawn and its doe mother, and then out of the trees and onto the beach, a horse, and this is the worst.
She feasts upon the horse until another strays upon the beach and she captures that too, succumbing to her wicked nature, running fast and silent and swift. Until her teeth find their throat, until she pulls them down upon the sand, their limbs tangled, their bodies writhing.
Her kelpie feasts, frantic, desperate, anything to survive. It eats as much as it can before Sereia can regain control, until she can rouse from her stupor and stop this frenzy. Her kelpie eats to keep them alive, Sereia starves them in the hopes that they might die, or a cure could be found before they do…
And it it when his neck breaks with a crack between her teeth that Sereia suddenly realises what she is doing, what her kelpie is doing. She scrabbles away, as flighty as the rabbit she had ended only moments before. She looks at her path of destruction extending out across the beach. Blood and corpses littered like confetti. She is sobbing louder now, louder than when she was frantically eating the first horse. Her eyes find the listless body of the stallion she just culled. He is perfect, untouched, but for the bite at his throat, his broken bones. She wonders if she should eat him, at least to make his life worth something. Her kelpie parries, crying yes, crying out because she knows she needs this, to eat, to live.
Sereia lunges wild, hungry for the stallion’s corpse but stops. No. No. She turns, barely in control of herself. She runs for the sea, she is knee deep within it. It washes the blood from her limbs, it cannot reach the crimson that lies across her chest, her face, her neck, her abdomen. She stands, an angel of death and turns, when a voice cries out against the sea air.
He is there. Golden and bright he stands at the edge of the wood, where the trees meet the sand. Before him is the first horse corpse, behind him the doe and her fawn. The kelpie claws within her, desperate, savage, needing him, his life, his blood.
”Run!” Sereia screams, but she is the one running. Leaping through the surf towards him, her eyes not her own, her mouth too wide, too wide, her hair lifted exposing all that she is, a girl of the sea, everything he hates. Her kelpie lunges for him, leaping out of the water, up the beach. She is there, her lovely mouth parted in an ugly gawp. She reaches for his throat, to live, to die.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
