HOW WE FORGET
tomb came from swell, swell from the rise of sea - a wake from an opening in ice. A ship - lit by a canopy of clouds under the cupol of night - appears perpetually in the act of changing course.
From what Locust knows, there are two ways to deal with loss. Anger – a burn that drags down your throat and collects somewhere in your stomach – and apathy – which feels like so much anger that it empties you out, a process reminiscent of carving a bowl. Locust would rather be angry, but more often she thinks that she is apathetic. Anger would feel better, when she slides her knife along the sternum of those dark-eyed, sharp-toothed things; anger would feel better, because anger would feel right, instead of the dull, useless ringing that comes with hollowing out a bowl – slicing off thin layer after thin layer of wood, until there is no bowl left to carve into. Her insides feel like fruitless chipping. Heart an empty space, left somewhere in the sea. Just jutting ribs, curving downwards, as she chipped away at what was supposed to be inside of them.
But sometimes she is angry, and it is always when she stares down at the dull-marble eyes of a dead one, and she thinks, with sparks of fury, you should have put up more of a fight than that, you shouldn’t have died so easily, you should have been harder, hurt me more- because it makes her think that she could have done something. If she’d just fought a little harder. If she’d pulled her knife on them, instead of floundering helplessly at the merciless crash of the surf.
She can’t do anything about that now, so she just drives the knife a little bit deeper into something that’s already dead – and twists it – and maybe it makes her feel a little bit less helpless, and that’s enough to put off the troubled stirring in her gut for a few more days, when she’s not staring at the dull film growing over the dead thing’s eyes, when she can wash it down with one thing or another. But it always comes back. Always.
Mooneye would tell her stories, sometimes, about vengeful creatures from the deepest crevasses in the ocean floor. Creatures that were born from blood spilt on the waves. That they’d come after the unjust with raking claws and oil-black eyes, eyes that let no light through – that they had sharp teeth, sharper than any shark or water horse. Bat wings. Or fins. Demons, or something like it, but demons that only went after those that committed the worst sort of crimes, so they couldn’t be demons, could they? Not really.
She wonders if she is like them, or if she’s someone they would hunt down.
(She finds that she doesn’t care about the answer.)
When the woman emerges from the crowd, she is leonine. Locust watches her with something that isn’t quite wariness, her eyes narrowing a fraction; there is a tension in her posture that suggests aggression, a curl of her lip that suggests anger. She is taller than her by nearly three hands, and far more powerfully built, with a shorn mane and a pair of curling, intimidating dark horns. All red and black, stripes on her flank that look more like they could be bloodied claw marks, a tail that lashes about her hooves. A soldier, perhaps. Or a guard. Either way, something about her suggests trouble, or that she is looking for it.
Locust thinks that she can be cohesive to either, but then the woman has the nerve to open her mouth.
Her eyes burn like hot coals, but Locust does not stir beneath them, like the guilty might shift under the knowing stare of a juror; instead, she meets them with her sharp teal stare, as blue as the woman’s eyes are red, and it is unconcerned. “You’re the captain with the gutted kelpie on her ship.” Her words run circles inside of her head, jarringly cold and accusatory, and that is enough to provoke the silver’s temper. But she has always had a smiling rage. Her lips twitch at the edges, threatening to curve up, and her eyes continue to stare into her own, as mad and as dark as the sea in a storm. She relaxes against the stone wall, fluid and silver, and continues to twirl the knife; over and over again, senselessly repetitive, perfectly dark material catching in the light and clicking every single time it completes a rotation.
Finally, after a silence that feels suffocatingly long, she smiles, but it is a smile that belongs on an crocodile – when Locust smiles, she smiles like a predator, in a way that reminds you that she has teeth. It never reaches her eyes, just lingers on her charcoal lips. A suggestion of depth – a cold, dark thing, a trench carved into the outline of her face.
“Seems my reputation precedes me,” the silver woman says smoothly; her eyes gleam with an emotion that is difficult to describe, but seems to suggest dangerous waters, the still of the tides before the break of a storm. “I suppose you mean the figurehead? I like to think of it as a warning.” Or a promise, she thought, if they weren’t clever enough to avoid a woman who pinned their death to the front of her ship. (Locust hopes that she does not mean the kelpie-skin, below deck; she prefers to keep those goods quiet, and, if one of her sailors was fool enough to let it slip, she’d have to slit his throat, something that she would prefer not to do. Messy business, killing her own, and terrible for morale.)
The clicking stops. The knife, suspended, hangs in the air between them, downturned; not obviously aggressive, but wary, certainly wary. She leans forward a fraction, still smiling, still gleaming, still terrible -
And she asks, her voice still unfettered, “I’m curious, stranger – what do you want from me?” Passage on her ship? Certainly not. To hunt a kelpie? No, unlikely. Her rage wasn’t at the gutted carving, though it was clearly because of it; it was at her.
She wonders, if she pries open this woman’s mouth, if she’ll find teeth like little rows of needles, or if she is simply the fool that Locust was, as a girl – that would see the dark ridges of fins on the horizon, cracking through the smooth curves of the waves, and she would know that they had teeth but forget that they could bite.
(Or maybe it is worse, but she doesn’t think of that. Maybe it is something more like love. But water-horses can’t love. Water-horses are death and tide, like the sea, and the sea can’t love anything – no matter how much you love it, and no matter how much it wants to love you.)
@Boudika || t e n s i o n || "sea of ice," callie siskel
"Speech!" ||
