This keening soul;
She follows her, from the deep. Looking up below the surf, she sees the girl as she steps over rocks and plucks from the basket of the sea all sorts of things to take back home with her. The girl looks for plants, Leto knows this. She recognises the actions. As an Ilati she spent many years scavenging for plants and and animals for scyring and healing and painting her skin.
The kelpie can name every species of kelp the girl pulls out of the sea, she knows the properties of each one. At her back the storm grumbles, loud and low and booming. The cliffs grow bleak and dark as eyebrows pulled low. Leto does not fear the storm that gathers out to sea and pushes in toward them, floating angry and ominous high above, stirring the sea below. Rain is a swirling smoke above the sea, reaching up to the cloud above. Oh, it is so bleak.
The scavenger has turned, she makes for the thicker shore where sand replaces stone and rock pools disappear. As the girl jumps down from the thin strip of cliff, landing light upon the beach, Leto rises black as ink from the white frothing waves. The slate gray water laps at her skin, it pours off her sides. Above the sky is grey a steel. None can see how the stars tremble, none can see how Leto’s blood is warming without the sea. But she steams, hot, hot, hot. Lightning strikes the sea behind her, she does not flinch, not even when the salts turn to crystals and the air fills with electricity.
“The tide is coming in,” Leto breathes as she reaches the girl and curls round toward her, feline, hungry. “And the storm is making landfall. If you wish to survive, you should leave the beach.” Her galaxy eyes draw across the girl’s skin, stars searing, planets turning. Across let’s body runes gleam in the light, some painted, unlifted by seawater, others engraved traceable, echoing, whispering magic. “Or you could stay and learn the force of the sea.”
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Anyone! | "speaks" | notes:
