The sea warns the beach, but the sand does not listen.
Death came and claimed and yet was overcome, between a girl’s teeth and within another girl’s blood. She rises up out of the sea, more alive than she has ever been. The inky waters churn and sluice from her hips and her hocks. Seaweed, bruised with purple night, hangs from the curve of her spine and her shoulders like a cope from a priest.
Leto is reborn. Old gods are renounced, New ones replace them, upon her silver lips she bears their names. Steam hisses, sea-water scolded away at it dares touch the glow of her veins. She rises out from the ocean in a plume of steam. The sea is a mirror, even as it fractures with waves and froths like glue upon its broken bends. Within the shards of the sea, Leto slinks, celestial and monstrous toward the unprepared sand. Her body is the swallowing black of the universe. Her veins cracks of light breaking in, obliterating darkness in heat and awe and ire.
The stars tremble in their pin-point places, scattered through the sky. They rage like the fire they set ablaze within her star-white veins. The shed-star girl lands upon the beach, like a wave that bends down to prostrate itself upon the sand. She steps out from the wave’s embrace and feels out it returns, pulled back by the moon and its deep night.
Within her hair bones and bells chime like siren songs drifting in upon the seabreeze. It is a lullaby as sharp as the teeth between her silken lips. The earth groans relief at her return. Leto listens to its whispers as she paints her torso in sweeping tribal patterns. Ilati charms, Ilati histories play out across her midnight flesh as she reposes, a mermaid, a cat, a piercing star upon the beach.
Once painted, once adorned in spells and ancient histories she rises from the sand. It is glass beneath her body. Glass where the heat of her starfire veins melted the earth. Leto laughs as a toe taps upon the glass. It strikes a divine note that sets the heavens weeping. The stars peel out of their places, her magic serenading them down, down. A solitary star falls, keen and wicked and bright. It laughs as it descends in ribbons of light and fire and smoke. It strikes upon her cheek and her chin tips up towards the sky, her lips painted in silver, her tongue demanding red.
To be reborn is a blessing. Its cost is that of blood.
Ah the serenity of nightfall, the joy in seeing one time blend to the next, the simplicity in remembering the cycles that guide us, never wavering. It holds no peace this eve, though. Perhaps nothing could still the thrumming in my veins of confusion and near anguish at my understanding of what has come to pass. I keep my pistons moving, as if walking off the face of this earth would somehow drop me back into the void from which I surfaced. The nothingness had at least made sense to me. I had a motive, I had a reason for moving and for living and striving and being. Now, I had none of those things and I could not be sure if it was because I had been freed to be shown a place where I could exist in the love of all things and the passion for existence in all its forms, or if Gaia had forsaken me and thrown my soul away to some strange land for daring to ask understanding.
How had I not seen it earlier? How had I not understood when I first emerged from the in-between? What a foolish young girl, they would say. How naive and trusting. Astral steps never did really touch and feel and yet I have done nothing but feel since I arrived. Savour the crush of snow beneath my hooves, the subtle chill of winter morning air, the fleeting warmth of the sun at the height of the day, the prickle of the atmosphere as lightning crackled and forced my skin to crawl across my bones in a way that was unnatural but not unpleasant.
I shook my pelt and kept moving, but the residue of that encounter could not be shaken from me, same as the chill that reached into my organs and twisted violently. It had nothing to do with the moon being full in the sky and nothing to do with the breeze floating up from the ocean.
Ocean… I swore under my breath so that none but the shifting sands could hear. I had found the edge of the earth and I knew there was no sense in walking into the nothing of the waves, but that didn’t kill the childish curiosity in it. I had never known the edges of land beyond waterfalls and rivers that cut clear paths to and from places that I would never see, a beginning and end that might as well not exist. I had seen lakes that may well have been oceans but always had another side I could travel the circumference to. I had seen the idea of oceans, had been beneath the waves and lived among the aquatics but only in spirit, in consciousness. My soul could experience the weightlessness and fluidity, but my corporeal shell had never seen them, never tasted or touched. I may have traveled a hundred lands with oceans and seas and all of them meant nothing more than a dream. Because dreams can’t hurt you, they can’t touch you and drag you under and swallow you whole. My astral self had always been with a partner, the safety of a sage, or Lorelei or even the voice of Gaia to guide me back to a sense of real.
But this is real. The bitter salt taste is real. The shifting smooth sands are real. The slick mist and the rumble and the foam of the waves are all very real. And the tide is coming in…
I stood at the furthest edge of the beach, staring out into the nothing of the ocean. The churning waves dark and inviting. They teased me closer, beckoning for me to roll into their depths and find a home within them. Their shifting colours glittering before me under the moonlight, the foam speaking in whispers from voices in ancient tongues. The draw to the sea, the call of the void, the need to know drew slow steps from my pistons, daggers sinking into the wet sand compact by waves and time and however many souls like me that had been summoned to just touch and taste and-
An icy glacier rocketed through my bones as the first rolling wave swept up to greet me like a hungry lover and caress my skin and suck the breath from me in a great moan. Forget all other chills, they were a minor fall breeze by comparison. Snow and blizzards and mountaintops could not compare to the aliveness of the ocean as it tried to greedily suck the marrow from my bones through my flesh. I tossed my tiara back and my silver rejoiced with the sound of the waves and joined in chorus as I shook with delight, closing my eyes to savour the eagerness of it to bring me under.
”She’s hungry…” I spoke to no one, to anyone who would listen, who could be out here in the deathless nothing of the shore. Madness they had said, to go to the sea at tide, in the night and in the cold. But I had to know what she was like and I licked my lips in euphoria to taste her and the bitter salt suddenly felt and tasted so very very sweet. I stood there, the dark tendrils lapping at my cannons and begging me to step just a bit closer, to fall into her embrace and the promises to be gentle to me that I knew were lies, but spoken so sweetly they tempted me anyways.
i will swallow if it will help my sea level go down
As one girl leaves the ocean, it lures another one in.
The waves undulate in dance, spray whispering like a dancer’s dress. Upon the sea air is a siren’s call. Its keening tangles itself around the girl who steps into its frigid embrace. From her steaming place upon the beach, Leto turns her gaze as the sea sings her deep-blue song. She watches as the girl, slim as a fae, steps out into the lapping water. It lips at her slim knees, her shadowed hocks. It gurgles childlike laughter and sends shadows twisting in its cold, iron depths.
The trinkets on the girl’s antlers gleam like moonlight. The catch the light and reflect the glow of Leto’s scoldin skin back to her. Ah, the Ilati woman glows starbright where she stands upon the shore and watches the sea seduce another.
I am to drown Leto once whispered, her voice an anguished whimper in the king’s ear. Now she watches as the sea seduces another. Closer, closer! its waves rise and beg with their soft spray. Will the girl rise from her drowning as Leto did? Is it fate that draws the girl out to sea, runs its seabreeze fingers into her bejewelled locks and tugs, tugs, tugs her out into the open water.
Wild and wicked upon the beach, the kelpie turns her body, a sacrament of black sky and liquid starlight. The keening of the sea captures her attention and she watches as the girl stands, as if waiting for the siren that will lure her in, in, in. But then, revelry comes as the girl’s head tips back. Her antlers reach down with jewel adorned fingers toward her spine. Leto sends her white-hot eyes searing up the slender column of the stranger’s neck.
She speaks, this girl who throws her head back as though she is an offering to the sea. (And the ocean rises for her. It reaches out with its soaking touch and turns the girl’s skin black in the bleak half-light). Leto feels it. Ah! Yes! It sinks in to her bones, her soul. She is moving, even before the stranger’s words are a song in her ears. The sands run away beneath her limbs as the girl moves tribal, wild, dangerous across the beach. She is scoured by the seabreeze. It tangles her mane into a knot of feral black roots, it sets the salt upon her skin until she is sticky, until the sigils she painted upon her body gleam and crack and seem to speak their ancient litanies out into the open water. Leto is a song of sea and sky and savage soil. The beach yields to her. The sand did not listen, though she sea warned it. Leto steps from beach to water and the liquid hisses as it shatters upon her slender legs and up her curving abdomen. The ocean runs itself along her painted runes, it washes the ones it can reach away into nothingness. Water erases all, if given enough time.
“Who is hungry?” The kelpie asks as she draws near and sets her gaze upon the girl. Her lids are heavy, the salt-slick lashes pressing upon her cheek and then up. Leto is midnight sliced open by channels of mapping light. She could be the start of the universe, the beginning of everything. Her runes whisper she is, she is. Feline, every inch of her a wicked grace, Leto reaches for the girl, moves to touch her lips to Torielle’s bared throat. But the air shudders in the space where lips and neck do not meet. Gods the girl is warm and alive. Her heart is a rhythm to which Leto could dance. The Ilati has become a celestial thing. Star-fire burns within her, she becomes a reckoning star and the ocean cries out for her.
Her lips tip into a smile and Leto’s head tips back too, a mirror of the antlered girl. She laughs and her voice is the waves. Bones chime in her hair, the breath of magic and portents yet to be told. Torielle trembles, her bones touched by a cold that does not relent. Leto hears their rattle and through the low of her laugh, the rumbles sleek and low like a lion, seductive as a creature made to lure, to hunt, to hold, she asks, “The sea bites like ice. She is always hungry.” Only then does her chin tip down and she gazes beneath the thick fan of midnight salted lashes.
Hungry… Hungry.. Hungry… The words are like a mantra spoken in some distant land. Or perhaps a warning, chanted by all the lost souls who had been drawn too far to sea and who had been tricked by her sweet words and a place where the sticky sweet salt of her touch would blend with the wicked bitter salt tears they cried and for a moment could feel whole. Yes, perhaps that, a warning spoken so much like an invitation that in my addled brain it may almost have seemed like a grand idea. A shaking breath filled my bodice as my audits became aware of a pounding that came in rhythm with the lapping of the shore, something thick and powerful. As it came closer it became more difficult to discern if it was not just the sea itself coming to bring me in while I dawdled and hummed and hawed and debated on if I belonged to her icy depths.
Not just yet, not yet… Gaia has plans for you, even if it is just more darkness and uncertainty. No… The sea shall not have you today.
And then she is there, as if by some force of the universe having ripped its way through the planes of existence, she is there. This creature adorned with trinkets of life and death, with a pelt as black and churning as the ocean struck through with light that I swear pulsed with an aliveness, with creation. She was both life and death, I was sure. No mortal flesh could speak with that lyrical tone, no mortal blood could welcome the sea with such open arms. Therefore, she was more than mortal, I was sure. And Gaia have me, that light... she was the cosmos, breaking and becoming, barely contained in this flesh that seemed crafted of the rolling sea and sands and beckoned me.
Hungry… Starving… Keening and wanting. That is the sea. She is lust, and deceit, and grief and desire. She is the force of destruction and the will of creation, measured only in natural disasters and miracles. And this frame before me, this equine who surely must be my mind forcing me to understand the enormity of her being… She is her.
In all my meditations, I had wondered what a god would look like. Gaia had always seemed like she may be a warm golden green, like a summer breeze. But if that is so, then what could this achingly beautiful creature hold dominion over? Blackness, sorrow, the hunger of the hunt and the lustful purring of the damned… Yes, perhaps that. If Gaia was the Earth Mother then the figure before me could only be the product of the universe itself. I could not stop my eyes from roaming her pelt with a hunger that I rarely indulged in.
My daggers shifted beneath me as the tide moved away and I moved with it, out to sea, towards her. It was as if my flesh missed the sting of her icy grip and begged for more, like a whipping boy who had come to need the touch of his master’s lash and equated it with his love. I wanted to fall into that flesh with its crackling invitation, it’s strange markings that pulled me closer, beckoning with some curious knowledge. My pelt shuddered with the breeze, my banner flicking behind me as if it might try to wake me from this dream.
After all, every time I had thought I might imagine a god had been in a dream. A stasis of some kind, with mantras and herbs and pleading. Mayhaps I had fallen asleep on the shore and the pull that I felt was the tide lulling me in while I rested my eyes. But I knew better, looking at her. This could be no dream, and no misguided Plane’s Walk, because the muscle under her skin twitched and moved and breathed and I could sense the aliveness in it. Or whatever it is that is beyond aliveness. Something alien, but pure and unknown but drawing on the need for something familiar.
Perhaps I had given leave of my senses to come here and to know the ocean. But if that had been my quest, then it would be impolite to turn my back on her. I licked my lips again, parting them and taking in the smell of the sea and all it could give me and filing the sensation into my memories so that if I never had the chance to again I might still recall the taste of her on my tongue.
”You and her are one and the same…” I had hoped that my voice would carry more weight but the words came out like the breath of a lover between kisses. And perhaps that is what I was, a virgin lover to the sea, ravaged by her strength and beauty.
I'll Take a Deep Deep Breath but I'll come back to haunt you if I drown
Leto nearly misses those whispered words, offered as if they are a secret, a confession. Even her bells and bones sound louder as they chime in the wild tangles of her mane. The sea, iron hard and bleak, hisses as it breaks unfathomably upon the shore. That hiss is something like a laugh. Leto listens, with her delicate head tilted. An ear turns toward the sea, but her eyes cradle the girl before her. The way she watches is dark and avian. Her eyes smolder like warm wood and shine as light gleaming upon the water.
The witch-wood girl does not flinch when the stranger’s gaze moves, and trails slowly across her painted skin. Does she know what stories are painted there? Can she speak the languages of the spells, drawn out in sigils across the skin. Leto stands, black and wicked-wild, and wonders if Torielle could speak her spells, would the magic work just the same? Would a star cast itself from the sky and cascade down to land upon her palm with white-hot fire?
The ocean laps at the fine-boned knees of the ebony creature it birthed only moments before. Its breath is salt that breathes coarsely across the stranger’s face. Can Torielle feel the way it rubs, sharp and hot with friction? Leto no longer feels the way it shapes her as if she is metal beneath the sandpaper. She has already been reformed, she feels the metallic magic tingle across her tongue.
You and her are one and the same… The words come back upon the wind and this time Leto smiles. Oh it is a lovely thing, satin lips concealing sharp teeth. Her blood runs white and hot. It sings like a bell, like a galaxy spinning silver, ricocheting stars.
Her. The sea rises up. It presses itself across her sea-slick skin. It laughs through bubbling foam across her chest and shoulders. I have called you by name. It hisses wet and free in Leto’s ears, You are mine and we are one.
The antlered girl watches Leto as if she were no priestess, but a god made flesh and blood and beauty. Still the Ilati’s smile does not fade from where it curls her lips lovely and curled, full of cursive words not yet spoken and of sigils yet unpainted. “Oh no,” Leto begins, her voice rough as the waves, silken as a kiss, wanting, seducing, drawing the stranger in. I am no god. “We are not the same.” She answers and steps deeper into the beckoning waves. The undulations press against her stomach, her hips, water sluices along the subtle ridge between her ribs. It pours away black and steaming. All of her steams, hot and feral.
Her bones clink and chatter in her hair with skeleton songs that are too old, too strange. “Come.” She breathes to the girl as she steps out deeper into the endless ocean. Her head tips back toward the girl. “I am not her.” Leto says with that same smile that grows ever more beautifully dangerous. The stars begin their trembling and the sea groans a laugh as it reaches for the antlered girl. Fine as a dancer, nimble as a doe. Beneath her wet lashes Leto studies her. “Come,” she breathes, “and you will learn all the ways that I am not her and she is not me.”
Her chin dips low, shadows pooling in the lines and hollows of her fine face. Her white paint gleams like bones, hallowed and wicked. “But you may grow to love her as I do, for the earth and the sky alone are not enough.”
The way that her lips part into that smile could break a thousand hearts and cause twice as many to flutter away into the night. The way that her lashes brush her cheek bones, laced with salt that shimmer crystalline make my guts twist with a heady desire. To have her, to be her… to be consumed by her. The way her lyrics fall from her tongue envelope my audits like a thick foam and I am overcome by her. This beautiful creature before me, be she flesh -unlikely, for no flesh have I ever seen could move me so- or a collection of stars and sea and the breath of the night and born on the moon, she is perhaps the only thing that has made sense to me since I first found myself on the shores of this strange new land.
For a moment I feel as though I might be able to forget -not forget, no, just tuck away as gently as a babe- that my goddess may have abandoned me. If I could just sink into her flesh, into the warm embrace of the water in which she stands, shepherd over the waves. Perhaps I have found goodness and wholeness again within her, this creation of the universe brought to light just for me to find. This prick of light within the darkness of my sorrow, dancing across my vision and beckoning me to find a home within her.
The sea rises to meet her every inch of flesh and the way that her form glides so effortlessly, as if the waves part for her and her alone. Even though the winter air chills me to the very marrow in my bones, the sea nipping delicately at my hocks and begging for more, I desire to fall into her embrace. My audits flick as a breeze trails icy nails against my skin, pulling at the silver jewelry on my body and orchestrating a clear chorus of bells. Enticing is what she is. Thick and lusty and an embodiment of desire
I hadn’t quite realized how much the Sages had tried to push such feelings away. And away from me in particular. Not until this very moment. Desire, they had said, would be the death of nearly all things. To desire is to harbor impure thoughts for people, for things, for experiences. It places some attachment, some ideal, to that which has no business with such things. Desire breeds contempt, and sourness, and ill will and hatred. Desire for another soul to be your constant companion. Desire for more knowledge than you are ready for. Desire to become more than what you are capable of. I realize now, with the chilling winds, with the tug of the sea drawing me further from the shore, with the beckoning of her wildness and abandon, that I have been aching with desire for many things.
And why shouldn’t I be filled with desire? Why should now, of all times, I be held to a standard that I never believed in to begin with? What is stopping me from indulging in the richness of this desire bubbling forth?
The figure before me slips back against the sea, beckoning me to follow, a billowing cloud of steam rising from her as a curtain rises for the audience at a theatre. She beckons me with her eyes, with her tongue and her body, to know her, and to know the sea. And now, of all times, I am overwhelmed with the base need to know. The sea calls, but it is second only to her, this goddess sent herald of the night. This wild woman who’s soul seeks to find the reckless abandon within my own and draw her out and dance naked in the moonlight. The chill of the wind pushes me into the heat, following her into the waters that chill all too quickly.
“If I were to learn anything of love…” I whisper, far more husky than I would have otherwise thought reasonable for a mare given any other circumstance. I lick my lips and taste the sweet bitterness of salt there. I lick them again. “I imagine you would be the only appropriate mentor… Be it of the earth, the sky or sea, or any of her subjects and creations.”
Perhaps I am all too eager to follow her and perhaps I have had some leave of my senses as the sea swells to meet me. My copper tresses swirl around me, mingling with foam and sea and starlight as I press further towards her with one goal in mind. To touch and taste and feel what lies beneath the rippling waters, what muscle lends life to the paint on her body and to know the texture of the salt of the sea on her satin skin and what her teeth would feel like if she were to swallow me absolutely whole.
She's in my head again She knows where I have been
She comes, this girl-thief, who stole a stag’s antlers and a jeweller’s jewels, through the waves. Her tines arch, proud, upon her crown and the gems gleam, rich, upon her long neck. Leto watches as Torielle wades through the swelling waves that bow and bend.
They warn her, this thief-girl of earth and wealth. They warn her with hisses and stinging kisses that break into foam against her knees and abdomen and chest. But Torielle heads them little more than the grains of sand heed the warning arch of waves that come to crash upon the beach.
Leto watches as this strange girl, oddly fae, licks her lips, desirous. She would laugh, this shed-star-Ilati mix. And though she does not, a smile does find its place, languid, upon her lips. The antlered mare reaches for black skin, not like a kelpie with a carnal need for blood and meat, but like a girl pursuing something awe-inspiring. “Careful.” Leto warns as she seizes the mare in eyes of stars and moons and clashing planets. Stardust presses upon the girls like the sea thumbs her salt upon their bodies. The priestess-witch laughs, at last. It is the sighing hiss of the sea, the searing heat of stars burning through the atmosphere. And the star does not cease burning as it slips out of the bands of blue sky light. It falls like a silent comet, its smoke a dragon’s tail of black sparks rippling out in its wake. Careful, it repeats Leto’s warning in a voice of igniting air. It misses the bejewelled mare and crashes with a serpent’s hiss into the sea.
But by now Torielle is too close, too close. “Do you wish to burn?” Leto warns as she arches away like night before the first ray of dawn. But they are too close and her question was no question at all. It was a prophecy that whispered you will burn. The black woman is, afterall, the flame unto Torielle’s moth. They shall meet in fire and sparks and Torielle’s wings will burn. She longs for a god and will meet only the sun. She will fall like Icarus, down, down, down from Leto’s stars and watchful, galaxy eyes.
And so they touch. Black skin split by veins of glowing, white hot blood. They touch: black-universe skin upon brown-aspen. Will she Torielle light like timber? Like the trunk of a tree licked by a flame. Will she burn like a wild fire?
Leto reaches for her, wondering how she is burned, angered by her own regret for a girl that watches her, nears her with only desire and no heed of safety. Primal, feral, wild as a panther, the kelpie parts the water as she reaches out with her muzzle, hot like summer heat, absent of a flame’s keen burning. “You want to know of love?” Leto asks and presses her muzzle onto the thief-girl’s burnt skin, “then know of how it burns and disappoints. I am no mentor for you. I am no god. Do not follow any but yourself.”
She catches my eye, a flicker of something unsettling in those silver pools twists my gut. Careful, she says, warning me away from her, though from a true desire to turn me away, from fear for me or of me, I cannot discern. Those starry pools are all that matter to me as the waves swell and crash around us, applause for the creature before me to do so well in bringing me from the shore, to a place at the edge of the world. It occurs to me, as a dull siren in the back of my mind, that she could be leading me to my death.
Perhaps that would not be so bad. After all, your goddess has seemingly left you to rot, what else would you have to live for? This strange land that, for all it’s beauty, is still nothing akin to home. Your purpose here is nothing- she has abandoned you, and you have no home to return to, for even if you had the strength to planes walk they would not welcome you any more than they would a buzzard on their doorstep. They are better to be rid of you than they are to bring you to their bosom. Your worth was measured by your knowledge to a life you felt dangerously close to a sham. What is there left to live for if all that you have known and done has been for less than a bittersweet lie?
The laugh is so much like the sea I would have missed it for not the way it brought the mare’s head towards the stars. The stars… I tilt my crown to the heavens and see for the first time the blanket of sparkling light above us, drifting, drifting down. The cosmos itself is drawn to the beauty before me, falling apart from the very seams to be close to her. As I desire to be close to her. I close my eyes, allowing the motes to fall around me. The faint hiss as each bright pearl touches the water is nearly lost in the staccato thrum of my heart. Do I wish to burn?
“Life feels so much like a wildfire, to burn is only natural…”The words are but a hoarse whisper, barely audible, even to myself. My mind is filled with the dense fog of the ocean, her bittersweet chortle, the taste of her mournful salt tears. Do I wish to know of love?
The world is cut through like an icy blade. The fog drops immediately, and there is a delay between what is happening and my understanding of it.”Then know of how it burns and disappoints. I am no mentor for you. I am no god. Do not follow any but yourself.” These words float to my audits from the lips of the mare, parted at the side of my neck where my mane has fallen away. Her maw is silken, and the touch is almost sweet, I imagine, tender. And suddenly, as my body and my mind finally come into sync, a near bloodcurdling scream is ripped from that very throat which those lips rest against.
My head pulls back violently, my cannons scrambling to get awayawayfrom this beautiful beast. The water is so thick, so heavy, my limbs are so cold, so numb they do not wish to obey my commands to runrun. They nearly give out beneath me, the shifting sands delighting in this misery, greedy for another meal for their goddess, the ocean, her loving sea to bring me down and drown me in their icy depths. I kick and splash and try to steady myself, to push my body away from this inky abyss in the form of the night sky and the cosmos. Is this what it is like to die? To undo the fabric of one’s self? I feel as a feral animal, a rabbit trapped by the cunning of a hungry jackal, and I must flee.
I can feel the hot iron touch of the predator before me spiderweb through my veins and I wonder how long it might be before her touch has turned me to ash.
