but really I just wanted to be the only one called honey
All she knew, really knew, with the senses, of Solterra was given to her tied together with a humble string of twine. Jade-leafed sage, desert rosemary, soft-petaled orange poppy. The gift was beautiful and treasured and a world of scent: dust and sunlight, dry heat and liquid gold. Most importantly it was given by young Apolonia, who had wedged herself in the fence around the kelpie’s fickle heart with the persistency of a scallop knife.
This is all to say it was not the king who brought Anandi here. He was almost an afterthought at this point, her quest for her sister’s future husband and king almost completely forgotten amidst the many thrills this new world had to offer her. Meeting this new sovereign, judging him, and potentially seducing him to the deep sea were now menial tasks on a to do list that bored her to no end.
To be frank, she had low expectations for the current sovereign of Solterra. First of all, he was not born into his station. This was the norm above the surface, to Anandi’s great shock and disappointment. Secondly, there was (so far) little talk of him in Dusk Court, where she had taken up residence, except for the occasional wary comment on Solterran politics in general. No mention of his beauty, or tact, or kindness. On the other hand, no mention of his ugliness, stupidity, or cruelty– but Anandi was not a half-glass full kind of woman.
She had to at least try, and so here she is, making the effort, and if she had time to bump into Apolonia while she was at it, well… perhaps this voyage to Solterra would be worth it. The annoying thing is: kings were tricky to entrap. Anandi could not just stumble into him in the marketplace (so… basic. Pedestrian.) and requesting a meeting just reeked of ulterior motives.
No, he would have to come to her.
When dusk falls, Anandi walks from the sea, dripping water that gleams tarnished violet in the setting sun. The air is dry, like nothing she’s ever had in her lungs before. It speaks of leagues and leagues of sun-beaten sand, rushing (as all good things do) to the sea. She hates it. With a sigh, she settles gracefully on the sandy beach, lowering to her belly and tucking her legs into her body like a doe. Like something innocent. Breakable, even. She has tactfully chosen a spot in sight of the high towers of the citadel– someplace she would expect a king to look out the window one evening only to spy, to his great delight and keen interest, a beautiful woman looking mournfully at the sea.
It may take time, but eventually he would come to her. She would return every evening at dusk until he did.
I wanted to be the word he kept in his throat.
A N A N D I
The first day he sees her, Orestes believes his People have come for him. She emerges from the sea as if she is the sea, an extension of the waves that move pristinely up the shore to rest, and wait, and watch the waves crash again and again. It is dusk, and the ocean is at its most beautiful. He observes her from his citadel and he admires her. Orestes accepts it as a dream, impossible but appreciated, and turns away.
The second day he sees her, he begins to feel uneasy. She may be there for him, but she is not of his People. Her shape is the same as the day before, and the water does not extend from her as if she is the water itself; she is merely a voyager, a dweller, of the sea he so fiercely loves. She is not the sea, as his People are. When he turns away, there are tears in his eyes. No. She is not the sea, as his People were.
The third day he sees her, he is angry. She does not belong there. Her beauty taunts him, a reminder of the unobtainable. The lost. He scorns her for it, and her persistence.
On the fourth day, Orestes stops looking for her from his citadel windows. He tends to business about the Court, and settles a disagreement between an ex-slave and an ex slave-owner, and he returns to his bed alone and dreams of a time when he had slept always in a throng of his People, and did not know the meaning of solitude.
Four days later, he looks out the window again at dusk, and she is still there.
On the ninth day he goes through the desert toward the sea. He smells it long before he sees it, and the salt awakens in him something he often forgets. His memories do not possess the poignancy they once had. Instead, he feels his memories. They are more difficult for him to see, to actually bring to mind. The scent, however, awakens a sharpness he has not felt in quite some time; and for a moment he can almost hear the singing…
But Orestes cannot. He instead listens to the shift of the arid sand and reminds himself he is no longer a son of the sea, but of the sun. And so his odyssey ends at dusk when she emerges from the sea on the ninth day, and he comes to her in all his golden glory, smelling of sand and sun and nothing of the sea he once belonged so intimately to.
He approaches at a trot, his ears pinned, but stops short of where she rests. His tattoos blaze the colour of the sun, and in him brews something dangerous, something feral and forgotten, but not so forgotten he cannot remember the taste of blood.
“Water horse.” it is both a prayer and a curse. He stands a little ways off, and there is a look in his eyes that can only be hunger. He is a famished creature, a wendigo cursed forever to be starved. He is staring at a reflection he cannot touch; an act he cannot imitate. As he continues to speak, his tone takes on something nearly indescribable—it is old in the way rust is old, or the cliffs are, or mountains worn smooth by time. He accentuates each word, each name, in the dialect it belongs to. “Morvarc’h. Morag. Each-uisge. Cabyll-ushtey. Opopogo. Ceffyl dwr. Bäckahäst. Eich uisce. Wihwin. Bunyip. Nykur—" and then, finally, "—Kelpie.”
Orestes was all of those things and none of them. Most belonged to the rivers and the lakes of the mainland, but all those things eventually bled into the sea. Into him. And all their names belong to him, to his people, as if they are the same entity. He closes his eyes for a moment and an expression of tight, pinched pain passes over his features—it is brief, but profound, before they open again and he stares at her with eyes the colour of a sea in a storm. They are brackish water, not their typical cerulean, and there is something prehistoric that exists there. On this day, he would be the sea in a storm. On this day, his flesh would yearn and yearn to become something infinitely more than flesh and in his yearning he would be reminded deeply, painfully, of his new mortality. His eyes are the only thing left that belongs to the water.
What does it feel like to be Bound?
Like this, he would always say. Like this. He tastes iron and copper and it takes him too long to realise he is biting his own cheek. The Golden King, the exiled Prince, he thinks of how once he had been the colours of the sea and now he wears the crest of the sun upon his brow and the gold of a wealthless kingdom, and he hates her for her beauty and her freedom, and he loves her for it.
“You are trespassing, water traveller. But you know that.” He stares at her for a very long time. He thinks, I will not be so easily seduced.
As he says it, he knows it is a lie. As he says it, he knows it is too late.
Already his heart beats like a newborn colts, and his external austerity does not reach past his face. His torment bleeds out his eyes in salt tears.
She would never look at the sea as mournfully as he does.
He wants to tell her this. And all the bitterness exists within him, but when he opens his mouth to say it, he only imagines it would be to challenge his own edifice, to claim some sort of righteous superiority on a life he no longer had claim too. He only sees himself picking a flower because it is too beautiful to live, too beautiful to exist upon the plant, and so rather than let that beauty be rotted it is better to kill it clean and swift. He clenches his jaw. He works his mouth.
He says, “The sea loves no one.” And in it is every curse he’d spat at his mother during dark nights where his soul suffered like a ship wrecked in a storm. His voice comes out heavy, and husky, and there is still a bit of the ocean in it, but it is dark and deep and rotted.
And they exist beneath the inky setting sun, streaked in colours of violence, and that sea whispers to him in a tongue he cannot speak back, and the light from within him burns with the ferocity of a dying star. He does not know what shape he would become if he could, but the warmth grows within him like a bundle of hot coals, and he feels a misplaced fury at this trespasser, at this sea creature, and still
his heart beats
and beats
and beats
and he loves her
so
so
fiercely.
Orestes
@Anandi | speaks | notes: this is not the reaction i expected
10-14-2019, 04:54 PM
Played by
Rae [PM] Posts: 113 — Threads: 14 Signos: 5
but really I just wanted to be the only one called honey
Eight sunsets.
Anandi had never seen the sky painted in so many colors. Some achingly soft (cotton candy pink, blush orange, purple ochre) some wild and fierce (crimson, blood orange, black-eyed purple) all whirled together in some elaborate, mysterious dance. Below the spectacle the ocean simply watched, and reflected, unimpressed, the ephemeral show.
Eight nights.
Hunting was easy in the warm, shallow waters. There was a bounty of fish, and a relative lack of competition. In those eight nights Anandi saw none of her kind, to to her pleasure, and the time passed quickly and unmemorably in the way time often does when it is being so carelessly killed.
Eight long days.
The sun way always too bright, here. It cut through the cerulean water like sky, and at the surface of the sea, the pale sand drank in the dancing light like prayer. Eight long sleepy days spent sliding from one restless dream into another. Anandi had laid a wide net, and the waiting made her impatient. But she felt the trap closing, in the way only a hunter knows to feel. It was a gut feeling. An instinct. Those eight days passed achingly slow but in some ways not slow enough. She savored the anticipation. Drew it out like something sweet and rare. Honey on the tongue.
And on the ninth evening, the sun king. Orestes.
He didn’t have the lineage of a king (of course, not to her knowledge) but he moved like one, she gave him that much. Like molten gold. Anger rolling out before him like a wave. The sea breeze whipped up as he approached, spraying sand sideways across the beach. When she opened her eyes again he was before her. Far enough away to be safe. Close enough that she could see the intricacies of his glowing tattoos and the blue grit of his eyes.
She noted that although he carried himself like a small god, he left hoofprints in the sand. Same as every man.
“Water horse.” Oh, how tired she was of being called that! But on his lips it was something different. Less contemptuous. Not at all fearful. Almost sacred and she-- she almost would not mind if he said it again. But instead he chants the names of her people, or people like hers. Most familiar, some unknown. He says each one like a king does, like a god, and she frowns, refusing to be impressed. She never did like a showoff.
“I’d prefer if you call me by my name. Anandi. If it please you, king.” She bites off the title of princess– too forward– and struggles to not roll her eyes at his brusque greeting-- too immature. It was a delicate balance between conveying that one had been insulted and complaining about it. She bows her head low, as some of the sweet Terrastellans at court had shown her to do. She never learned, though, how one should not maintain eye contact if they did not want to challenge another's authority. Or she did not care. "Is this the way you treat all your visitors?" Her voice is green-apple crisp, fleshy and sweet enough to sink your teeth into, and a small smile plays at her features.
And just when she thinks they're past the rough introductions, “The sea loves no one,” hits like a slap in the face.
He was damn arrogant, to speak that way to her. In that moment all her careful self-restraint is forgotten, and she snarls without hesitation. One long second of the beast exposed, sharp teeth flashed ugly-beautiful. A warning, a promise, a protest.
It takes Anouk, sweet Anouk, to calm her. He rises from the skin of her back and hovers near her cheek in loving reassurance. "I'm here, Anandi. I would not be if the sea did not love you." But there is hesitation there, in the calm voice that fills her head like water. "... Who is he, Anandi?" To that Anandi can only grit her teeth because she does not know. Not really. Not yet.
She quickly regains composure. Fangs are politely tucked away, facial expression withdrawn for something a little more docile, a little less "I will eat you." Eyes, it was always the most important to control the eyes, they calm from a raging green to a silvery jade and lose the intensity of a cat about to pounce. Instead they are polite and veiled, just barely suggestive of all the thoughts that would be too impolite for a lady to share ("Seriously, I will eat you"-- among others)
While she meets his gaze, she is careful not to look to closely into his eyes. The depth of them is reminiscent of a trap, and the kelpie is too wary and too sly and too proud to be caught so easily by any man, even if that man was a king. (-- They are lovely, though. Stormy, salty, sea-kissed eyes, a color one could live in.
If one must choose their cage.)
A small pure piece of her heart wants to ask "what do you know of the sea?" but it's... too soon for that. (yes she's uncomfortable. she's afraid. she's nervous and excited, moreso than she thought she'd be. Moreso than she'd like.) Each word is another play in a long, complicated game. One she intends to win. So instead of asking the question that calls to her, the one whose answer she fears, she asks: “What do you know of love?”
The question is– it’s supposed to be a weapon. It is supposed to cut the way his had. "I will not lose this game," she thinks. But… but he’s glowing in the fading light, a man carved not of sunlight now but embers… and her voice twists the words around, softens them, spoons them out with... genuine intrigue. A softness she had not wanted to reveal. Anandi's heart flutters angrily at this betrayal of the body.
“I will not lose this game," she repeats, to fend off the vague, sinking feeling that she's already lost.
I wanted to be the word he kept in his throat.
A N A N D I
Orestes does not comment immediately. He looks at her with all the wanton patience of the sea and thinks; oh yes, she is a daughter of it. “Lady Anandi, not all of my visitors bait me on the beach for eight days.” It is true. If she were here for diplomatic reasons it would have been just as easy to come through the gates of the city and meet him at the citadel, if not far easier. But this—there was an element of trickery to it, of seduction or mystery. And if he were another King the romanticism would have spoken to him in different degrees; there is no doubt he would have appreciated the break in monotony of reign. But for Orestes?
He feels distrustful and somewhat caustic, in a way that is atypical for him. She represents every aspect of his past that has abandoned him; she is a lover he once knew intimately but has lost contact with. Ah, and then—she snarls. He sees the subtle transformation just beneath the surface of her expression, the way her teeth are sharp enough to kill. He does not flinch from her. He would have been disappointed if she had not reacted in such a way; it is too easy for Orestes to imagine himself as her, on a foreign soil, entreating a strange King.
It is too easy to imagine it.
And he would have snarled too. He would have thought, no one knows the sea like I do.
He smiles, and his smile is ugly-beautiful too. He does not need the sharp teeth of a killer to remember the expressions of one.
Orestes cannot help it. His is nearly goading her and he knows it—among his people he was certainly more peaceful than others, but still. He cannot help but reminisce the times there were disagreements among his clan, how neatly teeth can cut. Orestes had been the Prince among them; sacred; nearly untouchable. He had not often had to fight; but for a moment he runs his tongue along his blunted teeth and longs for it. Trespasser. Because she is a trespasser.
However, Orestes cannot hate her. Because she asks, in a way that was meant to be snide but is not: And what do you know of love. The question makes Orestes smile in a way that is real, and true, and heartbreaking.
“Too much.” he says, but as he says it he thinks: but I know more of loss. He cannot tell her the agonising truth of his being; that just by seeing her, delicate and beautiful and fierce and perhaps a little cruel his heart breaks. Yet there is something undeniably lovely about it, as if for just a moment he walks in a dream. He softens suddenly, and laughs—the sound possess strange lightness, nearly a child’s laugh. It surprises him. He shakes his head. “Not enough.”
Orestes nears her, and it is the first time that he raises his ears. If he were still a water-horse, the sea would sing to him. It breaks his heart it does not. But instead he feels the dying warmth of the sun and he glows as if it is not dead at all. He is whisper-soft when he says, “And you, Lady Anandi? What do you know of love?” He wants to ask, and of loving a thing that will never love you? But Orestes does not. Instead, those blue eyes of his settle on her expectantly, and they are now steady, relaxed. He listens to the sound of the waves just beyond them, the repetitive crash and rush, and wonders what shape he would be called to become if he could still transform.
After a moment, he knows:
A whale.
Because the song his heart is singing is as loud and achingly alone as a whale's resonant call, deep beneath the surface where there is no light. Searching, with as much passion as a vocation. Lonely, lonely.
Orestes's eyes may look a little like that sound now, as he admires her, and thinks of all he has lost, and tries not to hate her for it.
Orestes
@Anandi | speaks | notes: this is not the reaction i expected
11-01-2019, 01:42 PM
Played by
Rae [PM] Posts: 113 — Threads: 14 Signos: 5
but really I just wanted to be the only one called honey
No one on the surface has ever looked at her like he does now. Like he knows her. She has been recognized before, for the darker parts of what she is-- a kelpie, a monster-- but not like this, like-- like he sees past the primal instinct and the sharp teeth and the predator’s finesse. He sees that she’s a daughter. He knows how the ocean loves her, how it cradles her. How it misses her when she’s away.
Anouk pushes into her skin, reminds her of it’s presence. It looks at Orestes. It looks and looks and looks, like trying to remember a lovely dream that was lost to the wasteland of the waking. Andi can feel the way it’s attention focuses on the king, and she does not like it.
“Lady Anandi, not all of my visitors bait me on the beach for eight days.”
Guilty as charged. Not that she looks it; Anandi just shrugs, and gives the smallest roll of her eyes. Then he provokes her, and when she snarls he just smiles, not as sharp but just as pointed. It only enrages her more. She glowers at him.
Do you think this is fun, king? Do you want to know how beautiful I can be? How savage? I’ll show you what your skin looks like, inside out. I promise it won’t be nearly so handsome, separated from your flesh.
She puts her teeth away anyway. This was certainly not the encounter she imagined-- he was supposed to offer her a tour of his court. They were to walk beneath palm trees as the heat of the day bled from the sands. He would feed her dates, watch as she licked her lips. Instead her blood is rising, not in an entirely pleasant way, as he roughly (easily) finds his way beneath her skin.
And then, before the rage can get the best of her, he smiles sadly and captivates her once again with his words.
“Too much.”
Laughter. She does not partake in it but bites her lip, uncertain.
“Not enough”
Would it be like this between her and every king? This constant cycle between anger and awe, attraction and repulsion? The violent, twisted part of her heart aches to murmur “Love is a fresh kill. Love is a split lip. Love is the wound, the pleasure, the weakness. Love is breaking, and breaking, and breaking.”
And the girl in her, naive and spun-sugar delicate, wants to say “Love is the color blue and the scent of rosemary and folding, gracefully, like a scrap of silk.”
Instead she says, with a proud jut of her chin, “A lady never tells.” And if her voice quivers, it’s only because of the weight of all the unspoken things, and the effort it takes to reign in those weaknesses before the golden king. To stand there with a brave face, when she is so very curious to know what it would feel like, to fold. (Instinct tells her he would not hurt her. But her being is one of precise balance, and she cannot let anyone disrupt that balance, or she will be lost. So she ignores instinct, and she closes her little-girl heart, and she shoves down the hunger and-- what then is left of her?)
“But-- me too I guess-- not enough.” She confesses finally, the truth squeezed out of her by the blue longing in his eyes. Heart-breaking blue. Heart-broken blue. And when he steps forward, she almost steps back. He was easier to make sense of from at a distance. More importantly, his nearness wakes up all the devils in her. The hunger focuses its dark eye on the sun king, and for a moment the wonder overtakes her-- What does a king taste like?
What sound does he make with my teeth at his throat?
She sighs, not without longing and not without disgust. It was important to keep him talking, to have something to focus on that was not the flutter of his heart in his neck or the color of his eyes or the warm glow of his skin, like the horrid sun was hiding beneath his flesh. “What’s it like to be a king? Is it as lonely as it seems?” The question is asked softly, hesitantly, as though she is not sure she wants to know the answer.
I wanted to be the word he kept in his throat.
A N A N D I
FIND WHAT YOU LOVE AND LET IT KILL YOU ALL THINGS WILL KILL YOU, BOTH SLOWLY AND FASTLY BUT IT IS MUCH BETTER TO BE KILLED BY A LOVER
Anandi's beautiful pride, her rigid stubbornness, softens his hard edge all at once. The urge to goad her, to punish her for the transgressions of her homeland, disappears. It is not like him. Orestes is left only with a resonant sadness at what no longer belongs to him. If he were another man, dapple-grey and still free, unburdened by marks of gold, he would have asked her to swim with him. He would have bounded into the sea, with a thousand songs. Instead he stands silent. Instead he stands knowing all that is no longer his to know.
She is so young. Orestes registers this with her slight uncertainty, the cycle of her emotions as she says stubbornly, a lady never tells only to relent a moment later. Orestes knowns there is a bit of hypocrisy in thinking such a thing; after all, he is young too. But his soul is not. His memories are not. It has been many, many years since he jutted his chin so proudly and played such a political game. He cannot even remember what life it had been in, when he still felt as fresh and wild as that.
Anandi is everything he misses and loves about the sea. Fierce, and unrelenting, and beautiful, and nearly shy.
What’s it like to be a king? Is it as lonely as it seems?
When she asks it, he wonders what she had expected of him. Regality, perhaps—the stereotypical king, dressed in royal purple and crowned at all hours of the day. Perhaps she expected courtly chivalry, or kindness. Orestes wonders why she cares about such matters, when the sea sings so sweetly. He nearly asks, but decides against it. Instead, Orestes sates her curiosity.
“Lonelier.” His eyes dance with mischief. He quotes: ”’I am too alone in this world, and yet not alone enough to make every moment holy.'”
Then, Orestes sobers again. “Lady Anandi, I will tell you a story. Perhaps you do not want to hear it.” There is no sun left in the sky; the light of his tattoos dims until they are cool silver lines against his skin. “The sea may love the land; it may learn every intimate crevice of her shore. But the sea does not belong upon it. The land will not accept the sea. She will push the waters out.” He draws back from her, step by step. “There is an island very far from here—it might as well be another world. Your distant cousins thought they could become a part of the land, there. They thought they might have the best of both; that they may befriend the land-horses, and coexist.”
His eyes are very sad as he says it. “I am not sure what you are looking for. But I am certain of what you stand to lose.” Orestes does not mean the comment as a threat. He says it in a way that implies, that suggests, he knows because he has lost it.
Orestes turns away then, after holding her gaze for several long moments. “If you would like to learn of Solterra and my Kingdom, you may visit. Ask for me, and I will escort you as a chivalrous king ought to. But do not wait for me on my sea shore and try to entice me, as if I did not once intimately know your language. Do not come to me to play games, Lady Anandi. I do not have the time for them.” He nearly wishes he had not come, as he ascends the beach and into the dunes. It is only when he crests the one nearest the sea that he stands to glance back at her. Then, he dips below the summit and into his desert.
Orestes
@Anandi | speaks | notes: eee i hope this is okay to end here! I'd love another thread with them, perhaps with anandi coming as dusk's emissary!
