It has been so long since my hunger has felt like a creature inside of me instead of a feeling. Each step is followed with the gnawing sensation of teeth digging into the lining of my stomach. Miles bring another dimension to the ache in my jaw. By the time I am knee deep in the swamp water I feel more like a thing coming undone than a unicorn.
But I know better than to hunt in Denocte where Fable is always flying low over the plains and sea. Mother knows, of course, that I no longer can sustain myself on apples and grasses. It is the price ‘saving’ me demanded. However I know that the price is mine and mine alone to bear even when it should be hers. Today I will try to be a gentle daughter and not force her to bear witness to the monster she’s made of me.
Sometimes I am still tempted to bring home the head of a fox and lay it at her feet just to watch her eyes grow dark and salted with an agony only killing me might heal.
Yesterday I met a kelpie from the swamp. I had pressed shoulder to shoulder with her, in the market, and demanded that she tell me the secret of living so far from the brine of the sea. It took more than a threat to make her answer, but I am a princess and so there is nothing that I cannot give when it suits me too. Afterall mother can make gold from coal and she owes me something more than even the air from her lungs.
And so today I am knee deep in the swamp until my hair is more green than sea-pale. The swamp kelpie told me that the mirestags stray into the muck and brine to find the mushrooms that sprout there (the ones, she whispered into my ear like a kiss, that bloom only at the full moon). In the same breath she had told me that eating the diseased skin of one would free me from the call of the sea.
I want that with a desperation that is so much greater than my hollowness hunger. There is no price I will not pay to be free of the tide. Perhaps this is the real way that I am a monster in the same way my mother is one.
@
