girls who run with wolves aren't here for boys to love. the moon sings every night, pulls the ocean's tides to shore; your heart belongs to every star, screams dance upon your lips. a princess should be built of stars and suns and forevers, your mother told you fairytales but she didn't tell you this:
Salt and sand and stone and sea and storm.
The water is black. Reason says no one should be on the cliffside. Reason says the storm is coming. Reason says run girl run as the clouds rush in and the thunder rumbles somewhere on the horizon, as if resonating from the belly of a great and terrible beast. Reason says run girl run there’s still time, there’s still time, there’s still time—
And then there is no more time.
The lightening cracks the sky like a whip. It reflects glass-sharp in the hungering sea and Boudika thinks this is me this me this is me this is me, my soul, crying out, hungering, hungering, hungering—
In all of these days, weeks, months, years the realisation comes to her with that angry sea and brilliant, brazen lightening. She is hungering. The red mare on the cliffside, chest-deep in the grass, separated from the sea only by parapet of rock. Even that she climbs, until there is nothing but air beneath her, a step away. She stands overlooking, a goddess abandoned by the gods, her shape aching to becoming something else.
This is what it is, she knows. This is what it is to want, and want, and want and as she wants the rain unleashes in a torrent, ripping apart the surface of the water below, melding sky and sea. The heavens and the oceans are stitched together in one chaotic thread.
And the things she wants are endless.
Give me a thousand shapes, give me Orestes back, let me taste Torix’s flesh in every way I can, give me the goodbye I deserved with my father, I want to sink my teeth into Tenebrae, I want to sail to a beach where no one knows my name and become something else entirely—
But Boudika stands at the end of her known world. She stands, the rain slicking her copper hair to something dark, something black. Aside from her shining eyes in her bald face, she is all black, all sin. It is only when the storm reaches its pinnacle that she begins to keen to the sea, a soft-sweet sound that rises and rises and rises and begs and begs and begs to be met with something more, with everything, as within the girl the wants of a god tremble on feeble, mortal wings.
I want to jump. But the wants outweigh that desire, and she trembles with all the things that are no longer graspable. She closes her eyes and feels the rage of the spring storm, the rain a cold lash to the face. There is something inconsequential and insurmountable building within her; an anger; a righteousness; a desire; and she never knew the taste of freedom is flesh and blood and rain on slick, sharp teeth.
@anyone || “speech.”
when the sun sets and the wolves run you will find that sometimes the princess and the witch are one and red riding hood will eat the wolf; there is fire in your blood, a forest building in your veins, don't try to lose the moonlight. you were meant for this. between dawn and dusk you were made of miracles and you can run all you want, but in the light of the moon the wolves will always call you back.
Anandi hears it from beneath the black waves, deep in a grotto where she did not see the sporadic and unpredictable flashes of lightning. It was inexplicable, how the sound carried so far. How it cut through water better than light did. The cry seized Anandi. It shook her, someplace deeper than bone.
She did not want to leave her dark, quiet grotto. She did not want to enter the storm’s fray, subject herself to its foreign violence. But she had not heard anything like that call-- well, that was not true, she had heard things similar. Beasts and monsters and things like god. But she had not heard that call before, that particular keening. Her first thought was that it was Leto. Or Lucinda. And if they called she would always go, no matter the distance. No matter the weather. No matter the obstacle.
At the surface, two jade eyes bob in the angry waves. Looking up, seeing nothing through the rain but a dark shape, vaguely feminine. Vaguely predatory. Anandi washes onto the shore, scrambles clumsily up the rocks, and step by step she closes in on the sound. The rain falls harder and harder. Somewhere along the way she scrapes a shin (a strangled curse-- “fucking legs!”) and the scent of blood fills the air. Punches her in the stomach.
She finally crests the rocky outcrop, and to her surprise the sight that awaits her is-- “Boudika.”
Each syllable is relished like a strange fruit. Bou-di-ka. Anandi expected to encounter her again. Novus was not big enough for the two of them-- in a good way. In an exceedingly good way. But still she’s caught off guard to see Boudika here, now, if not uncaged then close to it. Standing near enough to the edge of the cliff that if Anandi were curious to see what would happen, what the fall would look like... and the body, afterward, on the rocks--
All she had to do was push.
A strike of lightning, a visible cringe, a whimper that the thunder quickly swallows. She’s trembling. Hardly the picture of composure she so struggled to maintain, and maybe with Boudika she would always be revealed. It was not her first storm. But so far it was the worst that she’d weathered on the surface. Anandi was born and raised in the dark calm of the deep sea. The rain did not bother her, nor the wind. The thunder resonated with something feral in her and made her feel somewhat at home, but the lightning-- the lightning was terrifying. “What happens…” she glances to the sky “if it hits us?”
A N A N D I "Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like.
I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else."
@Boudika don't mind if I do <3
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
girls who run with wolves aren't here for boys to love. the moon sings every night, pulls the ocean's tides to shore; your heart belongs to every star, screams dance upon your lips. a princess should be built of stars and suns and forevers, your mother told you fairytales but she didn't tell you this:
The smell of blood, combined with the metal-edged scent of rain, reminds her of the sharp copper of pennies. Metallic, bright—so bright it is nearly a flavour, in fact. Yet, there is a delicate understanding that one ought not tongue pennies.
However, Boudika wants to tongue thisscent; she wants to taste the bright, too-bright flavour that dances in the air more like colour than a feeling. The scent is Anandi’s harbinger. The scent strips Boudika’s inhibitions so that when the grey mare crests the cliffside on a narrow path to utter the tiger-striped mare’s name—well, the beast Anandi discovers would joyously leap from the edge, if only to be closer to the sea.
Boudika does not answer the mare’s exclamation of her name. Not at first. There is an aura of disturbance, of interruption. Boudika turns away from the cliff edge, mouth half-agape and stretched in a ghastly fashion, the shape of the wail still on her lips.
The rain pelts them both; Boudika takes a step from the edge, toward her new companion. What happens if it hits us.
A Boudika from another life may have laughed charismatically, shyly.
This Boudika’s smile stretches to the macabre. She says, “Then it kills you.” But Boudika does not glance toward the sky, even as another bolt lights the two of them. Instead she takes another step forward; her crimson eyes are trained on Anandi. Oh, Boudika remembers this mare and wonders what would have happened if she had asked for the Change from her instead. Amaroq is in Boudika’s mind even as she thinks it, silent and mysterious as a lone wolf, here and then gone. Amaroq, sheathed in ice, with bones entangled in his mane like music…
Then:
“Does it frighten you?”
Her voice does not match her ghastly appearance; it emerges girlish, soft, and Boudika steps closer. She knows she would not find Anandi so intoxicating if not for the scent that lingers even now against the unforgiving pelt of rain. Boudika knows she would not find Anandi so intoxicating if she were her maker; it is because they are different, it is because she wonders what she tastes like.
when the sun sets and the wolves run you will find that sometimes the princess and the witch are one and red riding hood will eat the wolf; there is fire in your blood, a forest building in your veins, don't try to lose the moonlight. you were meant for this. between dawn and dusk you were made of miracles and you can run all you want, but in the light of the moon the wolves will always call you back.
If only Boudika had asked, Anandi would have changed her. Maybe not that first time they met, when the kelpie’s world had just grown vastly larger, when it all was still sharp-edged with newness. But later, as acclimation wore down her gleaming morals... Later, if Boudika had found Anandi, and asked for that freedom, the princess would have given it gladly.
And Boudika would never be alone, wailing to storm and sea. Boudika would be Anandi’s, and she would be well taken care of.
The emissary is not surprised by the answer to her question: “then you die.” But she had hoped for something else. Something to invalidate her cowardice. There’s another lick of lightning, and Anandi flinches again like she’s been hit.
The lightning, the thunder, of course it terrified her. It was something she could not understand. Worse, she could not charm. Apathy was beauty’s worst enemy. She swallows the lie stuck in her throat, offers the naked truth instead. “Yes. It’s terrifying.”
There aren’t many she would say yes to. Samaira. Apolonia. Marisol, maybe-- depending on the day. Lying was so easy, and truth so overrated. But Boudika was the first in Novus to show Anandi kindness and, even more striking, acceptance. Once, the other mare said “It’s only your nature.” How many times had Anandi remembered that statement and used it, shamelessly, to validate her actions? She tries to place the words to Boudika’s lips now, curled and devilish. They don’t fit like they did before, there’s something changed.
How long has it been since they first met- a year? How far they've come and gone, in different directions; yet here they stand.
“What happened to you?” Anandi takes a step closer. Step by step, the women draw close, between them now the animal scent of fear and blood. “We should go.” Her tone grows pleading. To the court, to the sea. Together, anywhere but here.
A N A N D I "Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like.
I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else."
@Boudika
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
girls who run with wolves aren't here for boys to love. the moon sings every night, pulls the ocean's tides to shore; your heart belongs to every star, screams dance upon your lips. a princess should be built of stars and suns and forevers, your mother told you fairytales but she didn't tell you this:
Perhaps fear should fill her like liquid nitrogen; perhaps it should freeze her blood, still her heart, send her limbs trembling. But Boudika is a huntress, now; and if she is a huntress this storm is her camouflage, the long grass through which she wades. How many tales of sailors drowning in such a tempest are there, in which it was not the storm that did the deed but some ghostly screaming beneath the sea? There is something archaic within her that laughs, nearly joyous. Yes. It is terrifying. Even if she had lied Boudika would have known the truth, even if she had lied simply looking at Anandi’s delicate, beautiful features it would be easy to discern you were made for a different kind of hunt.
Yet the remnants of Boudika that remain civilised feel privileged by the confession, just enough to take the hard edge from her expression, just enough to still the strange, predatory angle of her head. In a tone strangely dry for the circumstance, and darkly ironic, Boudika says, "Why? It’s only one side of the nature of the sea.” Can Anandi not feel it? The humid, intense pull? The way the storm was brought in by the waves, by the chill of the ocean crashing with the heat of the land?
Rather than retreat from her approach, Anandi nears her. There is no way for Boudika to know that once her Maker held Anandi’s throat between his strong jaws in a silent, predatory threat beneath the water. She could not have known. But she felt the same urge now; the urge that belongs to the lion crushing a still-blind leopard cub. Boudika works her mouth. Her tail flicks slow, thoughtful, with all the indolence of some great cat.
But in the end, Boudika steps toward her; she steps so close she brushes the length of her jaw along Anandi’s neck. Her breath rests at the nape of Anandi’s ear, nearly an embrace. “You know what has happened to me.” It could have happened no differently. Boudika would never have been able to master Anandi’s thoughtless grace, her beautiful but delicate intensity. No. Boudika always belonged to something less refined, more granular, a different type of atrocity. Perhaps a little more honest. Perhaps more bare-boned. Boudika rests there for a long moment, her mouth stretched long and ugly and glistening with each thick, leopard-seal like tooth against Anandi's side.
Then she draws away and takes another step toward the route Anandi must have taken to reach her.
Boudika’s ears flick back toward the cliffside, and the sea; her mind fills momentarily with the image of plunging from a cliff after two entangled bodies and she wonders how different things would have been if she had leapt like this, full of vigour, full of intensity. But then her ears flick forward; her tail lashes; she says, “Then lead the way, Anandi.”
when the sun sets and the wolves run you will find that sometimes the princess and the witch are one and red riding hood will eat the wolf; there is fire in your blood, a forest building in your veins, don't try to lose the moonlight. you were meant for this. between dawn and dusk you were made of miracles and you can run all you want, but in the light of the moon the wolves will always call you back.
She didn’t know this side of the sea. She couldn’t even claim to know its depths. Anandi knew the ebb and flow of the tides, the upwelling of cold water, the play of the light (strained) and shadow (trembling). She knew well its cruelty and its kindness, and most of all its capacity for mystery. But she didn’t know this side of it. It was a new violence to her, and though she may one day learn to love it, to lean into the storm like it was a warm body, that day was not today.
Fear was not something to be ashamed of. Fear is what had kept her people alive for generations. Surviving, if not thriving. Fear is what tells that now she must return to the water, that some thrills are not worth the risk. Fear tells her where and when she belongs, and it is not here and now. “Maybe,” she concedes with a roll of her shoulder that suggests not really. Not at all. “But it does not love me the way the sea loves me.”
It was a great privilege, to be loved by the sea, but in many ways it had made her soft. She had taken that softness and fashioned it into a kind of strength-- she was at least resourceful, and cunning. But in the end it was still a softness, it would always be a softness, and so she trembled at the lightning with fear instead of delight.
There is a sudden flash of lightning, and this time she does not blink. The image of Boudika, coiled and tense as a tiger, is burned into Anandi’s vision. The twilight darkness of the storm returns and Andi sees the other woman in double; seared in white and red, slick with rain and rage. God-like. Irrefutably kelpie.
The distance closes between them. Tremulous and electric. The words “you know what happened to me” sit bitterly in Anandi’s stomach. The ear they are breathed into flicks back. She wants to vomit. Despite the cold rain her skin feels hot, hot hot, and she is not sure if it is Boudika’s closeness or her anger or both which makes her blood boil.
“Who.” The word is barely more than a growl. Predatory and more than a little possessive. Who did this to you-- and would you be terribly upset if I rip their throat out? No one (else) had the right to do this. Boudika was hers.
Novus was hers.
Her tongue plays across the back of her teeth. Back and forth, across the seam between flesh and tooth, feeling the blood just beneath the skin grow hot. Feeling her own pulse, rhythmic and haunting. She could smell herself in the air, that fresh-blood scent hanging like a lure, twisting her up.
Anandi steps back, leads the other mare down the cliff with the eager swing of her hips. Partway down the rocky trail to the sea, where she knows below there is a gap in the rocky shoreline, she waits for the sea to swell with an incoming wave...
and without hesitation, she jumps.
A N A N D I "Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like.
I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else."
@Boudika
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
girls who run with wolves aren't here for boys to love. the moon sings every night, pulls the ocean's tides to shore; your heart belongs to every star, screams dance upon your lips. a princess should be built of stars and suns and forevers, your mother told you fairytales but she didn't tell you this:
Maybe. But it does not love me the way the sea loves me.
The first time Boudika truly met the sea, it had been as a child on a black-cliff island where it crashed day, after day, after day, upon the shore. Angrily. Furiously. The storms that hit the land were more furious than this, and they are in her blood still, as memories, as truth.
Perhaps it is Anandi’s fear that makes Boudika bold when she responds, “The sea will not always love you, Anandi. Perhaps this is practice for the day you are betrayed.”
Boudika’s willingness to relent, and turn, from the storm is a testament to the kind soul she once possessed. There is nothing subservient in the way she goes to Anandi; nothing that suggests, yes, I too am afraid. No. There is no ledge to talk her off of; no danger to save her from.
Who. Not a question. A demand.
Boudika measures the other woman; and measures her fury, her possession, the feral way the word is less a word and more a growl. Boudika’s mouth splits; her teeth gleam bright, almost pearlescent, in a smile that is humourless. Amaroq’s name dances on her lips, but to admit it seems to be a betrayal, or to offer some kind of satisfaction.
It is in your nature.
“Myself.” The truth is half-there, in that she had asked him. Boudika had wanted the change, had wanted her becoming. It belonged as much to her—if not more so—as it did to Amaroq. And, besides, it states blatantly what Boudika knows to be a resolute truth: she belongs wholly to herself, and the sea, and the salt, and even the storm.
This does not explain why Boudika follows Anandi; perhaps it is the fledgling nature of Boudika’s own creation, the way that she still thirsts for guidance, for companionship, for someone to dance with beneath the waves—
and already they are down the cliffside and Boudika is leaping into them.
The world beneath the water is composed of shapes and shapes alone. Dark shapes; lighter shapes; the swathe of foam and the echoed reflection of lightening on the surface. Furious bubbles pushed down by the storm; the meeting of cold and warm currents. They navigate their way deeper, safer, into an alcove beneath the cliffside where the storm is not so punishing.
Beneath it, Boudika glances up at the fury of the waves; to reach the calmer sea had been a battle in and of itself but, once there, she feels… strangely soothed.
She cannot help but ask herself if she would be so volatile a kelpie had Anandi Made her, rather than Amaroq. And so Boudika asks in a world of blues and greens and shadows, where Anandi is a brighter silhouette; “And what if you had changed me?”
when the sun sets and the wolves run you will find that sometimes the princess and the witch are one and red riding hood will eat the wolf; there is fire in your blood, a forest building in your veins, don't try to lose the moonlight. you were meant for this. between dawn and dusk you were made of miracles and you can run all you want, but in the light of the moon the wolves will always call you back.
“The sea will not always love you, Anandi. Perhaps this is practice for the day you are betrayed.”
The statement brought an unexpected heat to the young mare’s cheeks, an angry flush bolstered by a low snarl of displeasure. It was not just the words themselves but the way they were said. The arrogance.
“You don’t know that, Boudika. Don’t sound so certain.”
Because there was a clear difference between them, a divide that could be acknowledged but never resolved. Anandi never had that memory of meeting the sea for the first time. She had always known the ocean. For the first three years of her life it was her entire universe, as present and unquestionable as the sun and stars and moon were to horses. As infinite and as constant as the sky.
The difference between them is that Anandi was born and Boudika was made. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but it was the hand that each woman was dealt. There is a natural hierarchy, an order, and nothing would ever change the fact that Anandi was born on top.
Despite the self-assurance with which it was spoken, the ominous statement seemed ignorant and foolish to Anandi, as stupid as telling a Solterran that one day the sun would not rise. It seemed impossible to believe, but in some small way it scared her, too, for it spoke to a deep dark part of Anandi that was convinced she was unlovable.
All this she is thinking of behind a pretty little scowl as they step closer to the edge of the cliff. The seed of doubt has been planted. And when Boudika says “myself,” the word rising against the howl of the briny gale and the slap of ocean spray, it does not entirely come as a surprise. Boudika, oh, Boudika. What have you done? Anandi huffs, determined to appear indifferent while a monster howls in her chest with a loss she has no right to claim.
Boudika was hers
No-- it was far worse than that-- She wanted Boudika to be hers.
What was it that drove this sense of possession? Was it instinct, Kelpie, or some personality flaw? Perhaps it was fate being cruel, as it is. Tempting, tempting, never giving. Agonizing. She wanted the word and she had-- she always had-- nothing. Nothing but the skin on her back and the sea which she only now considers in a different light. It terrifies her to think of falling out of favor with the ocean-mother. It infuriates her to think of losing what little grip she has on the fickle landwalkers of Novus. It breaks her little twisted heart.
Anandi almost says “you know, you were the first one in Novus to show me kindness...” but instead she leaps into the ocean. She’s grown tired of talking-- of late her words have seemed ineffective anyway, not just with Boudika but others too. Her personal philosophy (strategy?) of give one complement and receive two in return had begun to fail. It was time for new strategies, and until she had the time to properly mull this over she would have to rely instead on instinct.
Everything is better the instant they are underwater, not least of all because the fury of the swell was far simpler to navigate than conversation. Her forelegs tuck into her chest so she can propel forward; her tail, strong and serpentine, lashes with satisfaction against the water. It was so satisfying to do the things one was built to do, doubly so to do it with another.
When they pass the worst of the ocean’s rage, the world is enchantingly still, borderline ethereal. They float, suspended in the gentle push and pull of the current. When lightning strikes its fury is softened by the sea’s embrace and spread gently through the water, illuminating the two kelpies in flashes of blue-white.
Anandi is stronger here, emboldened by her natural environment. When Boudika asks “And what if you had changed me?” It doesn’t seem worth thinking about, let along discussing. “Maybe nothing. We’ll never know.” She shrugs, resigned.
“Stay with me tonight, Boudika. The hunt is better shared.” Anandi doesn’t have the heart to warm the words, to twist and enliven them. She turns and swims into the deep, and she does not look back.
A N A N D I "Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like.
I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else."
@Boudika a closer. Thank you so much for this thread, it was delightful as always! <3
some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing
