She hears antlers against bark. It sounds so much like tooth across bone that she shudders, a rattling leaf in a wind. Her jaws still recall resistance of ribs between them. They dream in memories and warm, sweet blood.
Her eyes turn to where her king’s bonded lurks, a shadow looming. She holds it in the dark bruise of her gaze. There is a sorrow that lays upon the deep seabed of her wide, dark eyes.
As she moves back, shying away, recoiling like a flower from the shock of rain, he frowns. Sereia catches it. The sight paints itself across her memory and lays seeds in which her guilt blooms as sorrowful as the bluebells at her feet which bend and toll sad songs in the wind.
He asks if she is well. There is laughter bubbling up in her throat. She wants to let it out but holds it in for she knows there is no joy in that laugh. There is only sadness and loathing. Her lashes lower upon her cheek and she turns from his bonded with its tines that pry wood apart like a springtime melody. She settles her gaze upon Ipomoea, tips up her chin until her hair comes to rest across her nose and over her lips. It obscures her smile.
Sereia sighs.
“I am well in my body.” She says and wonders what wellness truly is. Has she ever been well? When she is dying from not eating, her mind switching off, her body struggling with the mountainous task of living, how can she ever be well in body? Yet she says it, and believes it. For she is full up on meat and blood. She is well for she is the furthest she has been from starving in months. And she hates herself for it.
Sereia says nothing of the rest of her. The kelpie does not tell him how her soul and heart ails. How sadness and regret for her actions grips her tight and has despair building within her like a frantic, churning river. “What I wanted to... what?” The gilded kelpie asks, in pursuit of his second question, as the bluebells of sadness sway and chime like waves at her ankles.
@Ipomoea
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
