He is growing weaker, she feels it in the way he breathes between her teeth, the way he no longer writhes in her grasp. He squirms now, but he is little more than a rabbit held fast between the talons of an eagle.
The golden stranger moves with her deeper into the water and all the time her eyes are searching for his dragon. Will it come? She wonders. Sereia does not trust that it will not. It is an irony though, that it is his dragon, with the mangled remains of its feast hanging between its teeth that tipped her over the edge, into the frenzied need for food and survival.
So she clasps him, her blood mixing with his where her lips lie tight upon his throat. Her own blood weeps down from a cut she did not realise was there. She barely feels it now, but oh, when she realises in her sane mind, when she feels the cut of it, it will be a lifetime of shame. His horn, when he swung against her, had cut the corner of her lips, cutting a shallow line up her cheek towards her eye. It was shallow, not enough to grow her smile, but it will scar enough to make it look so - an even ugly reminder and warning of what she is.
But now, now she does not feel it. Not above the waves of desperate, ravenous hunger. All that matters to her now is survival and every ounce of her energy focusses upon living and thriving and eating, eating, eating.
He rears up and she goes with him (clasped as she is at his throat). Then, suddenly, down he plunges them, into the deeper water. Sereia goes with him, they descend in a tangle of limbs and a plume of bright red blood. It froths above them and the sea laps over it until their presence upon the beach is little more than a memory. The beach falls still and silent. The corpses lying still and open to the salt-sea air.
Below the surface his dive is still pushing them deeper, deeper. The momentum of their bodies is strong, so strong they collide with the rocks of the mainland that lie in shallow wait beneath the water’s surface. Pain lances through her spine, only moments before it might have been enough to stir her desperation, to shoot adrenaline into her already frenzied body. But over the morning, as her binging proceed, so too had her stomach filled until suddenly it begins the return sweep from hunger to satiated contentment. The pain is enough to stop her. And she relelases him, though them still sink like a boat broken in two upon the rocks.
Sereia sinks first, upon her back. Beneath the floating of her hair she watches her kill. He is near lifeless now. She wonders if the twitch of his limbs is the tide, or life still trying to go on within his body. He is floating down above her, they descend, each lifeless (though she is the only one who is now thriving. It has been his life for hers. It was never meant to be that way).
Oh she gazes, suddenly sober, suddenly so very much Sereia. Her kelpie is suddenly so quiet within her, an eerie calm. She knows what she has done, she knows who she has attacked. Has she killed him? Suddenly she finds motion and swims up to where he descends toward her. She presses her lips to the groove of his throat, where life should flow bright and energetic… Nothing. The only pulse there is weak and thready. His life fills the water around her, crimson and bright. He is bleeding too much, too fast. She knows how death holds him tightly.
Tears bloom in her eyes, but the sea steals them. Grief shatters her, it touches every part of her she thought she had purged of her kelpie nature. Was it always due to happen again? Still that frenzied hunger swirls in her gut like a pool of sharks ravenous and chaotic.
It would be a kindness, she knows, to cut the fragile thread that keeps him clinging on to life. She cannot bear to see him suffer, to see the sea cradle him in his own blood. With a sob she lunges forward a small “I am sorry”, exhales against his neck before she fastens on to his throat again and shakes. Her bite is hard, fierce, anything to stop his life, anything to help him die faster, with less pain.
She shakes him until she can no more, until sorrow and grief makes her weak and then, weaker still, she flees him, down, down into the deep. She cannot bear to see him floating, limp, his eyes and body lifeless. She flees like the coward she has always been. Sereia escapes her nature as she always has, repulsed by herself. Down and down and down she sinks and never once does she look back.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
