This keening soul;
Leto is alight. Flames so hot they glow white, white, white, leap from the feathers in her hair. The dangling bones, tangled into her bones, char black. The bells melt and run down the groove of her slender and throat before dripping like silver and gold blood into the swallowing sea. Her feathers are gone, they are little more than ash.
The ebony kelpie is a star-strewn rock. She burns, celestial. The sea seeks to cool her, but its touch turns only to steam. Yet over and over it reaches for her, pressing in swells along her abdomen, into her flank along her slim legs. The shed-star is a statue within the sea. It is now so clear to Leto what she has become: a thing of earth and sea and sky. She was never balanced before, but now, triadic she stands, complete.
The other woman comes and she dances, dances, dances. She does not rest but moves crimson and wicked beneath the violence of the sunset sky. Euryale moves near, her skin warm, but the sea presses her back, back, it warns of the inferno she approaches. Slowly Leto’s head turns, holding the other kelpie fast with her galaxy eyes. It is not just the sea she was made to swim within but the space between stars, the black which is as deep and hungry as her own skin.
Who are you? The other woman asks. Leto smiles and tips her chin up and up and up. She laughs and the sound rises as incense. Up like a prayer towards gods she no longer believes in, down and across a sea that no longer owns her fear, out within a wood that no longer holds her captive. She laughs free and loose, it is the sound of tumbling chains, metal unraveling. Leto is free and bell-like. Her attention is a resounding gong, so straddling it is when she turns it fully upon the girl. The paint upon her face is savage as tribesman’s spear, her sigils echoing ancient magic and prayer.
Who are you?
That is the question that Leto still asks herself. What have you become? the answers are so easy:
A kelpie.
A priestess.
A woman.
A girl.
A shed-star.
An Ilati.
Leto is so many things and none of them all at once. Her smile is still wild and dangerous, intoxicating with its feral darkness. Slowly her sculpted jaw lowers, her hair falling salted and windswept to tangle in her lashes, to stick to her grinning mouth. “I am Leto.”
Her name means nothing at all. It bears no piece of who she is or what she is. The sea splashes as she wades through it. A slink, a stalking step brings her to crimson skin. She touches it, like a creature starved, like a kelpie asking another if they will ever cause a problem. Loneliness stalks panther dark at Leto’s heels. She clings to her independence, she paints self reliance across her skin in the arch of her neck, in her gaze throughout which distrust spreads like stardust.
“Why have you come to me?” Leto asks as her head lowers, her flaming mane tumbling across her cheek. It burns her, the sea swells in ire. Never does the kelpie let her eyes drop, always they press like teeth, like blood, scrying, the hidden truths from the other woman.
Will we be enemies? Her slim body asks as it watches Euryale, predatory, savage, gentle, curious. Leto makes no move to drive the other woman away. Her smile still plays across her lips, her eyes still press, pinning, holding, seducing - as all predators are wont to do.
@Euryale
Anyone! | "speaks" | notes:
