It is nothing like the sea.
The water is cold, cold, cold. And dim; there is no brilliant blue, no lingering emerald. The sea is sharp clarity; this is soft, like a dream, like a nightmare, and everything is shades of brown or deep, deep green. The reeds are not as alive kelp and beneath the water is quiet, quiet, quiet. Boudika holds her breath beneath the surface, drifting with remnants of current. Her tail and mane float brilliant crimson about her, and she focuses on the slow and steady beat of her heart, lowered to withstand the lack of oxygen. Fish cut paths across her front or stream by her sides, flashes of silver and light. The longer she waits the more at peace she becomes. Boudika is attuned to everything beneath the surface; more so than she has ever been attuned to anything in her life. She can feel the dance of the reeds against her flank and sense the creatures that shift within them, alongside her. The larger fish, even before they pass, she can sense from their energy, their pulsating power and life.
Boudika is teaching herself to become a water-horse. She knows the sea would eat her alive; she is too inexperienced, too uncertain. And so she rests among the reeds, and holds her breath, and snaps at fish as they stream past her, and dreams about what it would be like to swim with sharks. There is a longing in her heart, infinite and pained, that feels like the unfinished note of a song.
She cannot say what tempts her to leave the secretive alcove; it is almost as if in a dream she rises and swims to the surface, breaching it first with her nostrils, then her eyes, then her horns. She exhales in a spray of water, and inhales deeply enough to fill her lungs. Everything seems slow. She can feel the rhythmic, calm, calm beat of her heart; so much calmer than it has ever been. Boudika rests like that on the surface; only her eyes, her nostrils, her horns. Her eyes are dark slits above the water; she sees, after a long moment, what drew her attention.
He is floundering. Wings unfurled, crawling to his feet.
At once new and prehistoric, something within her laughs. Weak, weak, weak.
Boudika submerges again, and kicks closer to the shore. Her hooves touch the soft, silty, rotting bottom of the lake.
She can see him again, now. He has stepped to the water, has lowered his head to drink from it. Does he not know? Does he not even think to look?
Boudika knows she is not camouflaged for it. She knows if the light were brighter, if he squinted just a bit harder, he might find her bald face staring back among the reeds, wraith-like and intense. Boudika is enticed; her new instincts whisper dark things to her heart, her body, and she trembles with wanting. Her teeth prick against her own lips and her mouth stretches, stretches.
The water-horse bursts from the water in a moment of sudden intensity; crystalline droplets spray from her in a shimmering cape, and then she is standing in knee-deep water, mere inches from him. Close enough to kiss. Close enough to bite. When she fills her lungs with new, fresh air his scent hits her and she is nearly bowled over from it.
It is what life smells like, perhaps.
What a heartbeat sounds like.
What a breath is, whispered against the throat, exhaled in pleasure.
Boudika steels herself, shaking the water from body like a dog. She is smiling a wolf's smile but it trembles; everything trembles and there is something dark and secretive curling in her mind, a serpent, a thing that wants, a thing that hungers.
“You ought be more careful where you stop for a drink, stranger.”
