It has been so long since my hunger has felt like a creature inside of me instead of a feeling. Each step is followed with the gnawing sensation of teeth digging into the lining of my stomach. Miles bring another dimension to the ache in my jaw. By the time I am knee deep in the swamp water I feel more like a thing coming undone than a unicorn.
But I know better than to hunt in Denocte where Fable is always flying low over the plains and sea. Mother knows, of course, that I no longer can sustain myself on apples and grasses. It is the price ‘saving’ me demanded. However I know that the price is mine and mine alone to bear even when it should be hers. Today I will try to be a gentle daughter and not force her to bear witness to the monster she’s made of me.
Sometimes I am still tempted to bring home the head of a fox and lay it at her feet just to watch her eyes grow dark and salted with an agony only killing me might heal.
Yesterday I met a kelpie from the swamp. I had pressed shoulder to shoulder with her, in the market, and demanded that she tell me the secret of living so far from the brine of the sea. It took more than a threat to make her answer, but I am a princess and so there is nothing that I cannot give when it suits me too. Afterall mother can make gold from coal and she owes me something more than even the air from her lungs.
And so today I am knee deep in the swamp until my hair is more green than sea-pale. The swamp kelpie told me that the mirestags stray into the muck and brine to find the mushrooms that sprout there (the ones, she whispered into my ear like a kiss, that bloom only at the full moon). In the same breath she had told me that eating the diseased skin of one would free me from the call of the sea.
I want that with a desperation that is so much greater than my hollowness hunger. There is no price I will not pay to be free of the tide. Perhaps this is the real way that I am a monster in the same way my mother is one.
er life is quiet now—so quiet. In her youth, she had spent so much time in the loud that her ears still ring from it. There are parties, celebrations, that the Champion of Community rejoices in, but there is no hungry villain after her blood, there is no navy man trying to rip her to shreds, there is no threat on her home that wants to destroy everything inside her. Elena questions if she has ever known quiet before Novus, before Dusk, and she thinks Windskeep, but in a heartbeat, she remembers the war, the Great War, and wars are the loudest of everything (all drums and thunder and noise.)
It feels like it has been ages since she has been in the swamps. She walks through the water, knee deep, admiring the plants that have erupted for spring, not quite ready to be picked, but notes where they are, how many, and when they may be ready for use. There is a cold chill in the spring air, she expects to be the only one out here, but Elena is constantly surprised, why should today be any different? Blue eyes note the way she walks, the way she holds herself, the way she moves to carelessly through her swamp waters. Those blue eyes narrow and ice bunches behind them.
“You shouldn’t be out here,” Elena approaches her with all the confidence of someone who has lived in Terrastella far longer than she has. “These plants are delicate, you are destroying them,” she says, and though it sings like an accusation, her tone is much more gentle, only when she realizes how young the girl is. Older than Elliana sure, but not by much in the grand scheme, barely an adult, if an adult at all. “They are for the sick,” she explains this time, she cannot help the way her motherliness creeps into her voice. “Are you sick?” Elena asks her, those blue eyes looking onto the unicorn child. The empath stares a moment longer. “You want something,” she says and sighs. They always wanted something.
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@Avesta
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11-01-2020, 10:14 PM - This post was last modified: 11-01-2020, 10:15 PM by Elena
Finally I see the water wake of the mirestag where he has left tracks in the mush that the almost non-existent tide cannot hide. My knees are coated in slime, and algae, and water with enough brine and sulfur in it to make my eyes water. I am wise enough to admit, as the lingering ice brushes against my belly, that I had been almost aimless in my hunting. Hunger has always, always made an almost-fool of me.
But it’s something more than hunger that sparks and smolders in my stomach when I see his tines outlined and dark against the banana trees and weeping ferns. A dark thing curls around my heart and it tightens and tightens like a sea-tide noose when I try to settle my bones into a shape less like fury. When the mare approaches, a golden sun to the dark mirestag in the foliage and the bottom-of-the-sea-hunger in my chest, I know that I am unsuccessful when I turn to her.
My teeth feel like monsters of their own in my mouth when I turn a single ear towards the mare. I am too needy, too lost, to pull my gaze from the dark outline of my kill. And he will be my kill. He was my kill the second the old swamp mare told me the story. “And are you not destroying them as well?” I try to hide the snarl in my voice, the spit of hunger, the need of a thing more sea-monster than mare. But I’m not sure I’m successful when I finally turn my gaze from the mirestag.
The last time I saw a horse this golden, all sunbright skin and bone-pale hair, they were trying to kill me. My mother used to be this golden.
I have never been fond of the color of wealth.
“What I want is not something you can or should give.” The smile following my words is an echo of my wolf’s smile, all winter and teeth and insides out for all to see. I do not tell her I am not a sick thing for I know the flash of the black-sea as it shifts strangely across my gaze is not a look a sick or dying thing knows how to make.
The mirestag shifts and I can hear the algae shift around him and the vines catch in his tines. He is spooked, I know, by the sound of our voices. He can spook as much as he wants and try to run through the muck. But I am close enough to see the vines across his hips and I grew up racing wolves and dragons.He will not outrun me.
He will not survive me and all the golden mares in the world will not stop me now.
lena looks at her with blue eyes and she feels…hunger. It is a familiar feeling enough, she had felt it with Tenebrae, with Sereia. Elena knows hunger, but she flutters the emotion to the side, not wanting to dwell in it too long and risk letting it settle into the pit of her stomach. There are shadows under her skin, but Elena cannot bring it within herself to be scared, she can only sympathize the girl. Still, she calls sympathy better than pity.
Oh and that god awful want comes to find her in her bones. Elena tries her best to eradicate it, but it is too difficult when she knows that she feels the same most times. The girl does not face her, instead Elena follows her eyes up with her own of blue and spies the outline of the creature in the woods. The antlers are a give away, and her stomach sinks when the hunger and need are still there, and she knows it is not her own. “Not when you know where to look, where to step,” and those blue eyes point downwards. “It is an underwater garden.” Elena moves closer to the girl, knowing her steps as easy as a dancer on the stage in a ballet. Where to step, where not to.
And then she meets her eyes, and Elena feels her own sorrow drown out any emotions she may have felt before now. Gods she is so young, so, so young. “No,” she says in response, watching her carefully. She is a Champion of Community, maybe she should be more weary of the Denocte girl who has a desire to feed lurking in her very blood. But, she cannot bring herself to. If someone found Elli like this—Elena would want her treated with compassion and kindness. We cannot always so easily control our desires. “I suppose I should not.” She adds, coming to her side. “You found the mushrooms,” she says, bring her golden head closer to the water. “I hope you were not intending on eating them.” Despite herself, she laughs.
Elena too picks up on the sound of the stag that the girl is so intent on. “Is what you intend to do truly what you want?” Elena asks her, narrowing blue eyes, but it is not with the frost of winter, but instead spring skies of concern, like storms coming. “The swamp is not a place to spill blood,” she does not scold, but her voice is losing its summer warmth. “The water will remember what you do.”
There at times, and moments just like this one, where I realize how strange, how savage, how like a unicorn war has made me. Sometimes I think it was only the sea that turned me into whatever it is I have become (I have no name for it, not really). But when I look at her, with her warm and sympathetic gaze, I can only think of how things like that do not survive in the tides of carnage and hate.
Isra could have been like this, I know, had she not been forged in the flames of lust, and hate, and love. I could have been like this too, like a thing more similar to Aspara than I am.
But I am forged, and I am dead, and I want to cut the look out of her eyes that whispers to me of mother, mother, mother.
In me there is too much wolf to look at her when she steps closer like a sun to my moon (and the moon does not look at the sun as much as it swallows it night, after night, after night). And I might swallow her down too.
Look (there!) a bit of molten gold that is sweeter than fruit.
Part of me wants to swing my horn towards her instead of the mirestag just to see if another swamp thing might hold the same magic in the blood of it. “There is little under water that I care for.” There lingers, in the silence after my words, a weight that suggests that I might care the same for her if I drowned out that mother, mother, mother look in her gaze.
I could make her into something forged too, something dead, something that might cut the world open with me just to see how it might be made into something better (something where men and mothers do not look at monsters with anything but fear and respect). In my world there would be no war because I would swallow it all like a moon swallows a bit of sunlight. I would strangle it in the hollow, sickle curve of my stomach.
The stag moves through the water and I follow without a care for things trampled in my way. The promise of the maybe magic in his blood far, far outweighs any consequence. And what is a consequence to a thing that knows, intimately knows, how painful it is to die? The memories of the water do not inspire fear or caution in me. I remember all the things the water has done and it is far worse than any thing done by a unicorn, or a horse, or a pale mockery of a mother.
“I do not plan on eating the mushrooms.” My body echoes another step of the mirestag, my hooves nothing more loud than another whisper of vine through the mire. “I care only for the creature eating them, and if the water would like to remember it I hope it remembers exactly the shape of me.” The mirestag leaps ahead, a dead-thing running, and I lunge into the start of a chase.
Mother, mother, mother looks mean nothing with the possibility of freedom so close that I can smell the fear rising chaotic from its skin.
There are the things that she’s slaughtered and buried – the bones of secrets that she cannot bring herself to spill, the secrets she holds in the crook of her throat because she’s spilled too much already. There are a thousand things that she has wanted, but wanting, wanting eats her up. Wanting leaves her eviscerated, wanting leaves her split from neck to belly (and she has spilled too much already). Wanting leaves her empty. Wanting is never free.
Wanting splits her into halves, and sometimes even now she can still feel the half that she has left (the girl she was once when wanting things didn’t feel like an infection), and that girl is always crying – that girl has flowers in her hair and in her hands that she brings every day, as though the girl that she is now is lain out beneath a gravestone marker, six feet deep. Wanting can be lethal. Wanting can ruin.
Her own hands are not cleaner – there’s blood beneath her nails, too.
It’s what happens when you let yourself want.
She remembers a poem suddenly, coming to her side:
Tell me about the sun and the moon,
for he died every night for her to bloom
tell me about the sun and the moon
for she hid everyday until it struck noon
The moon does not look for the sun, it dies. And she hides away from the grief. So is the moon cowardly, striking a knife in his chest each night? Or is it the sun that slips beneath the horizon, only peeking out in the morning hours when she is sure the moon has stopped bleeding stars?
“I know,” She says, and she can see a thousand faces that must reflect in the darkest fractures of her eyes. “But I do,” she says, because everyone needs someone to care for them, to stand for them. The stag moves and Elena’s attention is taken before resuming those blue eyes looking upon the girl, ears moving forward atop her head as she speaks.
The stag leaps.
Avesta leaps.
Elena leaps.
She is forgetting something about the water. She does not care what it remembers, but she is forgetting that this water is not hers, it is not hers to throw memories into. And so Elena will make sure that the water only remembers the torrent of splashing, the running, and Elena crying out: “Stop. Let him be!”
Creatures do not listen to things with flowers in their eyes or caught between their teeth when they smile. Monsters do not come to heel at the sight of a bowl filled with food (they are too wanting for the meat around a spine to crave a bowl). And I am as much a creature, as much a monster, as much a thing craving that flicker of blood at her throat.
I do not listen. I cannot.
But what I can do that I do not is turn and lay my teeth against her throat. There are constellations flickering in her pulse with a hundred stories that I could pull loose. Mother taught me enough about stories (almost as much as she taught me about blood) and I know that I could take them from this golden mare. There is in her mother, mother, mother looks a glimmer that tells me she might not have the skill to deny her constellation from the tip of my teeth and the hunger snarling in my belly.
Does she know enough to feel endangered when I waiver in my flight uncertain which hunger I will soothe? Does she know enough to feel uncertain when I start to herd the stag into deeper and deeper mire that no water-horse can survive?
Does she know?
Had I been another creature, another monster, or the unicorn that I was before I was this I might have stopped to consider her. But a wolf does not stop at the belly of the lamb, a lion does not falter at the neck of a gazelle, the hurricane does not turn from the forest. Just like all the predators, and all the storms, I only gather my weight into my haunches as the stag stumbles through the muck and mire.
I do stop, or falter, or turn away, when my jaw hinges and I leap to wrap it around his throat. I consume. It is all I know how to do now.
But I wonder, as I drag him deep into the water where it starts to run out to sea, if the golden mare knows enough to feel endangered now. I wonder if she feels uncertain about all the things living beneath the water that are not as precious and sacred as a garden.
lena had once been a bright eyed, star crossed lover. She had sought out the good in everybody, but there are so many souls that come into her life, when she was in Beyond, in Beqanna, and here in Novus (and here in this swamp), that it is so hard to cling to that ideology. Her rope is about to snap, but Elena keeps climbing, thinking she can reach the top. Elena has tried and failed to pull herself back together. There are certain things, written deep in the cavernous space of the heart, that cannot be scraped away, no matter how much she digs and digs at it.
There is hesitancy in her, and Elena clings to this piece, and it is only this that the golden girl then thinks, she can be saved. She can save her. “Don’t,” Elena says, voice calm and pleasant but eerily distant, as if she were looking through this world into another, even when she turns and focuses on the girl (girl, she has to remember, despite the predator she feels inside her, girl like Elliana, like her own daughter) the wind pulls her blonde mane out of blue eyes.
But then something shifts in the girl and she denies Elena any victory at all in saving her (when will she learn she cannot save everyone? Maybe it is the cursed thoughts of healers and healers alone that believe such things. But she cannot save her and the palomino chokes on her pride. (It takes bitter like swamp plants.)
She chases her until the the water girl overtakes her, and though she is a foolish creature, lost in hopes, Elena is intelligent enough to know (or maybe she is broke enough to know) when it is lost.
As she listens to the feeding, to the dying. As she feels the fear, the satisfaction, the confusion, the hurt. Elena takes a flower from the vine, she thinks of the soul lost (of two souls lost), and places it in the water. The chaos not far from her makes waves, and it carries the flower far far away. The golden girl leaves the swamp, and for the first time in a long time— Elena prays.
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