Beautiful things usually are.
Sereia turns to him. Watching him beneath the soft curls of her hair. She had spent the night touching it. Marvelling at how it dried soft and not sticky-dry with salt. The girl does not touch it now, though she longs to. For tonight she lets herself dream of what it is to be a landlocked woman. With a mouth full of blunt teeth than a jaw full of daggers.
Beautiful things usually are.
No, she feels more beautiful tonight pretending she is not a kelpie than she does when she lets the monster within her rise up. The silks covering her too-thin body do nothing to hide her angles, though they do manage at least to soften them. Yes, she feels more beautiful now than she normally does.
“You think they are beautiful?” The girl asks, more a nereid than a monster of the ocean. Is that why he was stood before it for so long? He is quiet, she cannot read him, but she tries. She lets her gaze trickle over every part of his face. Like the fingers of the blind learning a face for the first time. She longs to learn him, to understand his quietude better. He is like the window of blue sky amidst a storm. She is sure, if she flew to him, that window might close and the storm surround her. Yet instinct pulls her in nonetheless.
His own question sides along her spine with a shiver. It slips up her neck and presses itself ominously into her ears. How could she say yes when all her family are from the sea? She loves her sisters, gods she would die for them. She cannot let a lie tangle itself upon her tongue. Yet, it is not a whole lie, for she does not like herself, the monster that slumbers in her core.
Her eyes fall for the ground as she considers. “There are water horses that I love.” Sereia says slowly. “But some I wish to banish.” Now her voice is more acrid, more agonised. Her eyes close tight, her brows pressed together as if her stomach twists with the agony of bearing her awful monster within.
He offers her a respite and she takes it as she turns from the gold of him, the curve of his wicked horns, black as death’s scythe. That maybe should have been her first warning. Yet Sereia does not heed it, for what, to her, could be more dangerous, more awful than the monster within herself?
Sereia smiles that lovely small smile and at last looks away from him and the ebony hippocampus. “Please.” Nimble as an elf, she steps away from the statue and down the path he indicates. “Will you show me your favourite?” She asks him, ‘Unless the waterhorse was it?”
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
