The guilt is a sickening feeling. She does not swim far until its debilitating effects stop her. Sereia retches into the sea, convulsing in the water. She may be washed clean of blood this far down into the deep sea, but she is bloated on meat and blood. It tasted good. It tasted sweet and warm and divine. She retches again and sobs a strangled groan.
It is not just blood the sea has swept from her body, but tears from her cheeks too. It is only the dark of her eyes, the downward turn of her lips and the deep grief carved into her face that reveals how deeply she hurts.
Sereia follows the same pattern as she has a hundred times before. She pledges herself off meat, she cries wretched tears for her lack of self-control, she considers her own death in penitence for the lives she has taken.
Gods. The golden stranger.
She remembers how he hung in the water when she was done. He was so still, his blood was a thick cloud about him. The fish had fled, escaping before their own lives were taken. But the irony is this: Sereia cannot eat even fish, any life is valuable.
Valuable. Yet she left the golden stranger as though he were worth nothing at all. She needed to pay him the respect he deserved, not flee, addled by guilt and terrified of her own monstrous nature. The first part of changing who she is is facing up to what she has done. This is her cycle. Sereia always begins hoping that this time would be different. It is, on this occasion. It is the first time she has killed a friend, some one she knows.
Already she has turned. Already her guilt has her swimming back the way she came. Sereia returns to him, swimming out of the murky water and up towards his golden figure, framed by the sunlight reaching down through the water. The light dances across his skin. He is so terribly still. She cries more tears that are stolen away too soon. Only the wide curve of her eyes show how filled with grief and regret she is. Slowly, slowly she approaches him, all of her meek and soft and sad.
Sereia’s heart plunges like an anchor when her eyes fall upon his wounds that still bleed into the water. Should he not have stopped bleeding by now? Elegant, slow, the kelpie moves toward him, to touch his skin and remember how he once was warm and alive-
His eyes snap open.
Oh.
Oh!
Sereia knows those eyes, that gleam, that rabid hunger.
No.
No!
But yes.
Her creation lunges for his Maker. Sereia recoils from him, fast, instinctive. She may yearn to shed her kelpie nature, she may prefer to die than kill another soul. She may wish to weep and beg his forgiveness and chastise herself for her inability to fight her hunger. But despite all of that she is a kelpie. She moves like one, darting when he lunges for her. Slipping away from his frenzied hunger. Instead she lunges for him in turn, to grasp him about his throat, to press upon his jugular, to remind him that she is the dominant one here. She is his maker and master. Every lethal move that was put into hunting her prey only hours before gets spilled out and directed into this exchange. “No!” Her kelpie laughs at him, at her. “You are mine.”
Sereia forgets, forgets beneath the inescapable drive of instinct that she is supposed to be soft, that a kelpie is not what she wishes to be. She forgets as she exerts her authority over him, pushing him until he yields, seeking to hold him between tooth and jaw until he falls still, compliant, hers. Until he learns in his new being that he has a maker and it is she. She forgets - until she doesn’t, until suddenly she pulls herself from him and swims back, back.
Regret is bitter on her tongue. It is poison in her veins. She convulses beneath its terrible effects. “I am sorry,” Sereia croaks. “I am so sorry.”
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
