Tenebrae calls a name into a sea that has swallowed everything a name could possibly be. What is the girl he seeks if not the ocean itself, the wild hunger, the dark lash of salt waves against his chest? Does he not know she is already all around him, that she has pushed him back toward the shore all along, saying, not tonight, do not come looking tonight, this is no place for you.
He is a fool for forsaking the message. He is a fool for wading into a sea full of hunger, a sea that would sooner drown than save him. Boudika already knows what he does not; the ground swell is coming, the water from the distant squall that will raise the inland tide. She knows what he does not; that hungry things are fighting in the depths, full of the ocean’s rage. There are gods and goddesses older than Novus’s and they live here, in the heartbeat of the water, in the rhythmic pull of waves and sand.
She swims beneath the surface, listening to his nearly wanton call again and again, her name, her name, and she nearly laughs. It is as if he is the siren, singing. As if she would ever want him more than this, this, this—
so at last Boudika emerges in a rush of water and fury. The air is charged with the pressure of the storm; she is sensitive to the beating of it far off the coast, the way rain water has already hit the surface. There may have been hope if the water did not press them so close together; there may have been hope if he did not press his lips nearly to her ear and whisper, Dance with me.
Boudika is more than half-wild; and her appetite is the appetite of a storm that would devour the world. She closes her eyes and groans against her better nature, the threadbare part of her soul that whispers as if to reign in her hunger, no, no, no. But Boudika’s eyes snap open. As the storm makes landfall she says, “No. Dance with me—“
The sentence is cut off by the abrupt violence of her transformation. The entire time they stood chest-to-chest her body trembled with the desire to break form, amorphous, and become something else, something better—
In the same breadth it takes for lightening to strike, Boudika is a saltwater crocodile lunging for his face.
It does not matter where she grabs him; only that she does, and with a powerful flick of her tail she drags him struggling to the bottom of the sea. The water is brackish with the storm, a sort of opaque darkness that his shadows must be familiar with. The sea is quiet, strangely, despite the storm; a push and pull of water, and the bursting flavour of blood. There is a tremendous strength to her jaws but once there, Boudika lets him go and settles in the deep, watching.
This is the only dance she knows, here.
Boudika isn’t sorry.
"Speech." || @Tenebrae
when is a monster not a monster?
oh, when you love it
