Her gaze tips up to watch him as he studies the archway. The lights cast their light upon him. They make him luminescent. She once thought the light from the archway was as if being held beneath the surface of the water. But seeing him, this man, with his wings and flowers, she now realises it is nothing like being beneath the water. There is too much colour here.
The glass paints him in sorrow and despair. It inks colour across his skin that glows with hope. Sereia is sure he does not feel it. Not when his head bows low as if burdened, as if there is a weight upon it so heavy he cannot lift his head. If she knew he was a king, she would know. She had seen the way ruling a kingdom laid its weight upon her father, her mother, her sister. They were all weighed low. They all suffered. Though she may not yet know it, Sereia had already vowed in her soul to never marry into royalty, no matter her own royal status. She ached for her elder sister, for the demands placed upon her. A fine prince she must meet. Continue the line, make more royal progeny.
No.
No.
The kelpie opens up a part of herself. It is a safe piece of her to expose. It is the part of her that dreams, that is not stained with blood and hunger. This side of her is not a monster.
The way you danced did not look sad.
For so long she gazes at him and does not speak. Time slows, it lays itself out before them. Each passing second is beautiful, long and agonising in the way a note is drawn out upon a violin. Time turns into a symphony, for Ipomoea its voices are screams and dragon fire. For her the symphony is the hiss of waves, the keening of the dying - at her hand. Time fills their silence with the laments of the dead. The way you danced did not look sad, he said. She breathes, “I danced to forget.”
He talks of a graveyard beneath her feet. The things he does not say - that of bones and bodies and ash - she imagines anyway. What else could one imagine when given the picture of a graveyard? Though she longs to no longer be a kelpie and not yearn for meat a moment longer, she does not shy from the macabre. The fact of bones and skin and death are so deeply entrenched in her being. It is a song full of beauty and horror that sings out through every part of her.
Sereia inflicts upon herself a plague, because she refuses to succumb to the sin of taking another’s life. Even at the cost of her own. She would die here, if it meant she did not kill another. But oh, her kelpie had other plans. It longed to survive more instinctively than she.
So Sereia lowers her lips to the earth, where the thump of drums resonates through the earth. Do the dead hear the festival above? Do their bones tremble in a deathless dance in their afterlife? She touches the earth that forms their sky, it is respect and quiet sorrow. How many bones are buried because of her?
She lifts her head, her lips stained with earth. It blows from her mouth like ashes on the wind. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... “Do you know the dead?” Sereia asks, low, low so only his ears catch her question. The rest is swallowed by the night music.
“I can show you how to dance, to forget too?” She beckons him. “The arch is beautiful, but you are growing roots. They are holding you down.” She whispers, “Come and break your chains.”
@Ipomoea
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
