[P] When did we change?

[Sereia]

Sereia

She swam with the sea until it branched off into a river and wended its way deep into the island. Though Sereia had not been here at the island’s birth, she heard tales from her sister. Great tales of terrible happenings and fickle lands that changed in a breath. The world twisted and turned and became something so utterly, different. Then time stood still. When it awoke from its stupor it raged in chaos and catastrophe. 


She swims slowly, deeply. She explores where the island hides its secrets, where bodies lie submerged in great chiasmic openings now filled with earth and water. Her breath grows shallow as she watches bubbles rise and wonders of their souls. 


The kelpie goes until the river runs dry and the land rises up to meet her. Slowly the girl emerges from the water, slim and elegant. She walks as if she is not a girl born in the deep ocean, but one born with solid ground beneath her limbs and air in her lungs. She follows the deep gouging river bed and wonders why the water has stopped. It hangs back behind her as if it dare go no further. Ahead a blossom tree leans out over the empty river bed. Its petals are crimson and they fall continuously from the tree’s slim arms. The blossoms gather in the river bed and flow on like water, continuing along the way of the gorge. Sereia steps beneath the fountain of petals, tumbling down from the tree. Petals line her spine as water droplets might have.


Curious, buoyed on, Sereia follows this strange petal river. Blossoms roll over blossoms gathering in number from the giving trees that pour their lives into the rippling river below. They almost carry her, these strange petals. They pick up speed toward the edge of a cliff and Sereia swims swift and fast toward the bank. She clambers out just as the petals stream over the edge. They tumble and drift, swirl and float their way down to the pool of petals below. Sereia watches from above, she sees the grasses around the blossom pool and the flowers that pour water as if they were fountains.


What strange world is this?


A figure moves below and Sereia watches them, “Is that’, she asks, “a water flower beside you?”



@Sea


 

Here in the forest
dark and deep
I offer you
eternal sleep.

~

[Nachzehrer]

Life in the beginning never made sense. My universe as I knew it then was chaotic, and the first words my father ever spoke to me were in warning.

Our world knows not how to rest.  It will never be quiet, or still. Time is sick, and it will never think twice - or once! - to ask you how you feel about it.  Remember: Sand shifts.  Water consumes.  Air suffocates.  Never trust the flowers. And most importantly, Time will change you whether you are ready for it or not.

And it did.

At that very moment actually, the entire ground shifted beneath his feet and swallowed him whole.  I knew next to nothing about the man I called Father, just that he was buried before his time.  Buried beneath my feet.  Buried, now gone.  No time for mourning.

Everything beyond this point does not make sense.

Once upon a long time ago, my life was a bit of a mess.  I managed the chaos quite well, but once it took me the same way it took my father, swallowed whole.  The ground opened up like a great whale mouth and swallowed me and several others into its earthly jaws.  I was shaken out into the sea on the other side where mermaids would not leave my hair alone.  I remember swimming and swimming and swimming and their claws would be pulling through my hair, weaving straps of kelp and other lockets from the deep.  Since I came out the other side alone, I accepted their company - but I remained wary of them just like the water they lived in.

Eventually a shore manifested itself, quite like the shores of the island here, the only difference is that the stones and boulders that made up the coastline rose up and up out of the sea, too tall for me.  By the time I reached the land a quarry of stones had risen up from the depths to create a wall.  I was rejected by the earth once again.  It is a rare time for me to tell you that I relied on the accompaniment of three mermaids to guide me through the waters.  Normally they just drown colts that end up in the water that way, yet this time, our strange friendship saved my life and they led me to a most certain freedom that I could never thank them enough for.

I have never been a man of the sea, but that is exactly how I arrived onto the shores of Novus. 

Now I have been here for several months (a season or so) but I’ve remained aloof in the sands of Solterra - an easy place to disappear until one is ready to resurface into society again.  I guess the only difference is that all of the societies I have ever known, I would not choose any of them for myself.  All I can say about all of this is that, I’m really glad that I haven’t been swallowed by sand or chased by a giant gila monster (all Teryr’s put aside).

Exploration is at its peak.  Winter is over.  Wars have subsided.  The influx of visitors has risen once again and I am compelled to make another journey to explore new earth beneath my feet.  I’ve never been one to shy away from a real adventure - but it is safe to say that I have some reservations about visiting anything mysterious.  The kind of transformations that have been written on the subject of the ‘mysterious island’ have me convinced - that some part of me never left the hole that I was shunted out of one day.  That same part of me yearns to go back despite how vicious and unforgiving the unsettling landscape was.

And so, that is why we are here at all.  The island was not hard to find.  I have spent all morning here already, nothing really speaks to me quite the way my old home does - but that must be the point.  It is so beautiful here, the flowers especially.  I can hear old warnings in the back of my head now as I stop to observe a bluebonnet rapidly growing up from the soil.  Whenever I take a step towards it, another bluebonnet grows.  Before I know it - I am following a trail of wonder and intrigue.  Like a child, I forget my surroundings and pay attention to the magic I should be wary of.

I ignore all the signs.

These trees aren’t trying to kill me, yet.

Sereia could have been a jaguar waiting for me in the bushes.  I wouldn’t have seen her as I make my way towards the pooling water.  These enchantments bring back strange memories and stranger feelings, I am consumed by my childhood wanderings as I investigate quietly.  Then, when she speaks, it startles the smoke right out of me.  A thick cloud of black veils my face “Oh! - ah .."  

I blow the smoke out of my way to see her.  All three eyes fixate on the stranger's graceful swan image, two to Look and one to See.  “Where I am from, we call them blood blossoms - the trees themselves are carnivorous. "

@Sereia  Not sure what this is O.O

[Sereia]

Sereia

We call them blood blossoms - the trees themselves are carnivorous.


Sereia turns her sunbright eyes from the horse who slipped from the trees with the satin gleam of a raven’s wing. The trees welcome her gaze as they cast their petals down into the flowing river. On those petals roll where water should be the tide yet crimson is the river that meanders on with ever increasing numbers of red, red, petals. 


Each tree is dark and tall as a guard along the bank. Their gnarled arms reach out over the petal-river. They seem quite beautiful as they weep their crimson fronds away. Sereia’s eyes are wide and grave as she studies them. Each tree is achingly beautiful, their white bark gleaming nearly gold in the setting sun.  Was it their hunger for blood that made their petals run red? If she stepped close would their beauty turn to savagery as they consumed her flesh and bone?


Her golden hair falls across her eyes. The azure ends of her hair reach down for the river’s surface as if to remind it that it should be running wet and blue, blue, blue. But nothing is normal here - least of all Sereia. Is that not why she has come?


She is so like the trees, is she not? Her tongue craving blood, her stomach craving meat. She is as beautiful as them, she is refining the art of appearing… normal. The girl hides her too wide smile behind small, shy grins and the veil of her silken hair.  She tamps down her wild hunger with a grip like iron. Her kelpie is fettered within her angular, slim body. They are all starving, her body wilting like a flower without the sun, without water.


But oh, her guilt. Her heart, her soul cannot cope with the killing, with the blood, the violence. 


She turns away from the beautiful, hungry trees and looks down to the black horse below. Could they sprout wings and fly up to her? Their body is raven black and cool, gleaming blue. They are a raven as they watch her, as they tell her of the feasting trees. But she does not see feathers atop their body and she wants more of the words upon their tongue. She wants to learn of the beautiful trees who hunger like her. They are trees who do not deny themselves, nor grow as angular, as thin, as she.


The girl was birthed in water. Though she loathes it, it is where she thrives. She casts the man a long, long look, hesitant, wary, before then she steps from the waterfall’s edge. The drop is not far, but it is enough that she feels like a god falling out of the sky. The petals greet their fellow hunter and they draw her down, down into the crimson pool that does not wet her skin, that does not press water into her gills. 


Petals brush her body like butterfly wings. It is surprisingly easy to swim in a river of flowers. So the kelpie drifts towards the raven horse who stands upon the lower bank. She rises from the pool and the petals cascade from her slim torso as water should. Sereia is dry and the flowers are silent as they land gently upon each other. 


Already Sereia has hidden her too-wide mouth from the stranger’s sight. Already she keeps her golden eyes shrouded by the thick wave of her lashes. Already she has sought to forget how she must have seemed rising out of the pool: gilded and terrible with ruby petals falling like blood from her body. It has felt too right to be bathing in crimson; her heart, her soul recoils. 


The kelpie brushes past the ebony stranger. She holds her breath, she dare not smell how their body tastes upon the air across her tongue. The water-horse presses her lips up to a water-flower. Its petals are small fountains, wetting the earth at its roots. All around the raven-boy and kelpie-girl is a forest of fantastical anomalies. The island turns herself into something strange, something wonderfully dangerous and cradles at her heart a kelpie who is deathly beautiful, sweetly horrific. 


Sereia aches.


She tips up her gaze to study the one with raven skin who told her of the hunting trees. She smiles a small, small smile. It is beautiful as it curls her lips upward - the arc of the rising sun. “Where are you from?” Sereia breathes, she yearns. “To know of trees that feast...” She does not finish.


Her gaze tips up, her slender neck extending, to better peer beneath her forelock at the trees atop the waterfall. She returns her gaze to him after a moment, after a long and aching moment, “Do you think they want to eat meat?” Sereia whispers small and sad into the space between them and, one might think that she does not ask her stranger about the trees at all. “Do you fear them?”



@Nachzehrer


 

Here in the forest
dark and deep
I offer you
eternal sleep.

~

[Nachzehrer]

Sudden de ja vu hits me - out of no where - it strikes like hot white lightning between all three of my eyes.  If I had hair on the back of my neck, I imagine it might be standing on end by now and I might not ever know why.  Thick plumes of swirling, violet-black smoke billow off of my neck and shoulders and blister the clear air like drops of blood in water.  And, from the corner of my third eye - I think I see blood on the woman in the water.

When our eyes meet, lightning strikes somewhere - not here.  And for a moment, I am reminded of all the mindless madness my life founders on.

“Your eyes are very yellow.” I observe.   (Like a rockfish, or a snapper) I think. My words are auspicious, my voice ever deep and soothing like lake waters.  I turn to look at her approaching and realize it is not blood on her, but blossoms.  “The stories these trees might tell us .. .. if we were meant to listen to them.”  I bet she knows already, that I don’t have a story to tell her about these trees.   She knows, she knows.  

Why? Because we are not meant to know - this is a magic we are not meant to understand.  I know this because I feel the same static deep inside my bones - of a magic that holds me captive the same way it held my father. I am the plaything. I am the pearl trapped inside of the oyster’s shell.  It will take what it wants from me - then leave me with everything or nothing at all.  

Today .. today it leaves me with endless intrigue.  Today it makes me contemplative and fills me with nostalgia.  Where are you from?  Oh -- To know of trees that feast … -- She doesn’t finish.

Good,  I don’t know how to answer that anyway.

Do you think they want to eat meat?

I look up at the trees and I see their withy branches raining red and bleeding their petals into the banks.   Their undersong seems cheerful, all things considered.  “I don’t know.  I have a parable of the trees that I do know about.”   I was born out of wild, licorice black magic.  I came from beneath the rotting roots of a diseased tree, misfortune’s fool.  It would be my wildest luck if the magic that consumed me - has found me here. My father rots in an oyster shell millions of moments away from me - I can smell his strange stink here.  

I know it has followed me here.

“I was been eaten by a forest.  Once.”  It sounds like an easy death with how casually I deliver this.  I hear no birds in this forest, so I wonder if the forest is listening too.  I feel like my soul is in every piece of this place, bits of me growing in everything - my bones and my blood and my flesh; wood, water, and petals.  The swan in the water is waiting for me, I don’t have to look at her to know that it isn’t enough - everything I have to say.  It will never be enough.

“After that, my eyes opened again and suddenly I was much older. I was falling through the air, flightless, thoughtless, and then the sea caught me.”  I remember the cold water most brilliantly, ice tearing through my skin - my glittering blood poured out of me as if I my body was commiting golden treasure into the deep.

“I would say it had to be winter.”  Because the seawater was as biting as a tulip (you wouldn’t get that joke unless you were there) -- “, many other men fell with me, they were all eaten by the Nereid which lived in the sea.” 

Except for me.  But at the time, I was not just a horse - I was a universe crushing into the sea of another world, I was parting clouds and shaking the wind. “They gave me a different name than the one I have -  they called me Viasýni.”  My eyes go distant, I remember living in the sea.

My story wends directionless, watery, both in and out of focus, streaky at best.  I tell her about eating fish for the first time and why I can not understand why trees would eat meat.  I tell her about strange sirens that guided me to the shore - but the shore rejected me.  I had to return to the sea with the Nereid and float on.  “I saw seven moons come and go before I felt the ground beneath my feet again -”  It is terrifying to know I floated like a buoy in the sea, guided by fishes and other natatorial efficacies. 

The breeze shifts direction - it stokes the smoke off of my neck like a billowing fire catching heat. The way the petals drift across her skin reminds me of mid-summer when apple blossoms skate across the surfaces of puddles and other things.  She reminds me of the water - I don’t know why.  Is she made of gold?  Or ivory?  The light never settles on her - it just ripples and waves.  I have to squint three different ways to see her when the sun is overhead.  

"I do not think I am afraid.  Are you?"

@ Sereia     WOW THIS RAMBLES ON AND ON AND ON and on and on and on … …

[Sereia]

Sereia

Your eyes are very yellow.


If they are looking at her eyes then they are not noting the way her smile is too, too wide. Sereia blinks slowly and for once does not shy from the way the stranger watches her. The gold of her irises are framed by the black of her lashes. 


...Your eyes are very yellow...


She wonders if the yellow and the black combined might make her gaze look sharp and poisonous as a wasp? 


Ah.


She looks away at last, sadness and shame blooming deep within her breast. But then, then the newcomer talks of being eaten and her gaze drifts back. It settles upon him with all the danger of a wasp upon an open palm. She does not know whether she waits, keen or fearful, in this stranger’s gaze. Yet she waits all the same, to hear this tale of trees so much like her.


In her ears is the sound of their words and the ever so light rustle of red silk petals rippling out across the pool as water should. The water flowers gurgle like merry streams. Her feet are wet. The earth swallows them. She wonders what lies beneath the grass. If she sank through it, would she fall into the sea?


Suddenly, then, their thoughts match. She looks for the signs of bark teeth upon the stranger. She listens for the grumbling sounds of ravenous trees digesting their meals. She thinks of being swallowed whole and sinking into the sea. Her eyes close. This is what she runs from, from creatures like her. She looks to the trees, their gnarled limbs extending toward her. They beckon strangers closer. 


“Is this forest as hungry as the one that once ate you?” Sereia whispers as her kelpie rolls over. She shivers and shakes. Sereia trembles as fragile as the crimson leaves upon the trees. 


Viasyni.


“It is a beautiful name they called you.” Her voice is a whisper, a brush of grasses over summer flowers. Sea salt settles upon her lips and across her tongue. “Swallowed by the land and by the sea..” She wonders, her voice trailing off, swallowed by the breaths of the island. It inhales with the breeze, exhales with birdsong. “How did you survive… I think you are not made to die.”


Slowly her gaze gilds the stranger. She turns them into gold beneath her watch as if she is Midas and they a treasure blooming at the touch of her magic. But really, Sereia possesses no magic. She has never yearned for it. She smiles and her magic-less body, possessed only by a kelpie’s wiles, steps graceful and sleek beyond the stranger. Their body is warm, their flesh sweet. Sea-salt still clings to their body, the lovely depths of the woodland still echoes in the texture of the stranger’s skin. “Can I call you Viasnyi too?”


I do not think I am afraid.


Her eyes close. Dark lashes are dusted and weighted with relief. Joy curls her lips. Shyly she dips her chin so her smile is obscured, yet her eyes tip up to peer at him beneath the thick, kohl of her lashes.  
“I am not afraid of them. Only of myself.” Slowly she turns her gaze back to the stranger. “But I do not think i need to fear around you… You who seems to survive everything.”


@Nachzehrer

 

She wore her hope like a crown,
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams

~ Ariana