He speaks.
And she wonders what thickened his skin to this unyielding, tough leather. It makes him ugly and worn, even as his beauty is in his indigo black and the gold that pours like tears from his eyes.
The fact is, his beauty steals the breath from her lungs. But beyond the vision of his body, lies a soul and a personality twisted, bleeding and wretched. She has never met a man like him. A creature as broken as she. They are broken in different ways, the shape of their fractures do not match. Sereia and Raziel collide like tectonic plates, they eat of each other, turning themselves into molten hot ire. The cut each other with the fractured edges of their brokenness.
The Solterran turns her into a weapon. Not the kelpie within her, surprisingly. No, he turns her into a sabre of words. Even as she fills herself up on the ugliness of his words, even as she watches him with anger burning bright, still a part of her feels his hurt.
He hides it better than her. Yet she feels it, she knows it is there, deeper than this shallow plug of dismissive hurt and anger.
The kelpie inhales him. The sweet scent of his skin and the heat of his body are a delight to her. She lets it slip down into the baser reaches of her. Those places where a kelpie prowls, wicked and hungering, savage and without forgiveness. Sereia takes a piece of her and lets it rise, lets it infuse her every part until she tips her lips to him, until she relishes how soft his cheek is beneath her lips and the words they are about to speak. He is breakable. She could fracture him into a thousand more pieces, beyond the pieces of him he has already made.
“By your logic no one owes you any kindness or mercy either. You condemn yourself to a lonely and dark world absent of love and compassion. Keep sewing your hatred, it will see you dying, cold and alone and heartsick.”
She delivers her words like a satin noose, soft as silk, but inescapable. Yet, Sereia is not made like him. When she peels herself from his body, when she pushes her kelpie back down, down, down, she is too filled up on goodness, on light, upon hope.
Retreating from him, she looks back, still the unyielding, hungry eyes, but softened, softening, “But if you want something you are not owed. If you don’t want to be heartsick, lost in the darkness, dying alone... find me.”
And then she is gone.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
