02-22-2018, 02:05 PM
She dreams – one dream, a recurring thing that plays itself like a favorite movie on the backs of her eyelids. She dreams of osprey wings, white and black and shining, and of sea-salt. She dreams of love, and of loves; she dreams of home, a home that is hers no longer. Her dreams show her nothing she does not already know.
”Even an anchor cannot hold against the storms” she says, whisper-soft and sweet. She remembers the ocean drying and receding; remembers its foam-soft grass browning and falling. Without them, it was nothing. And as her beloved home had faded so had she, and what then? Darkness. Darkness and cold and lightless days, splintered with memories and with regrets. The world had pressed in against her and forced her away, and her once precious sea despised the very figure of her. Then I slept she thinks, but that could not be right. No one sleeps away days, months, years… but she had slept, in some form, and awoken only days older in a time span that was much longer. She had never been, after all, normal. So she had convinced herself that she had spent the time wandering and keeping herself alive, drowned in arms she was now sworn to forget and searching for faces that faded the nearer she got to them. She abandons her memories in favor of night and company and presses the pale of her nose against one of Warrick’s ocean-wings. ”But you need no anchors, sea-hawk” she smiles, and her voice is orca’s song and wave-break.
They are not so different, Warrick and Saedís, in that they desire (and almost, expect) the same ‘love’ from all they encounter. She is the bright-eyed child so quickly to lay her trust, for she has not yet learned what betrayal this could bring to her, or what continual pain this simple act promises. And he? He is the osprey-king who has been hurt and has been broken, but still he insists on giving, and it would be this trait that Saedís would most come to appreciate. She can already understand it in his ocean-dark eyes, but she has not yet known it.
It is his next question that brings a fleeting shadow to the ocean-depths of her gaze. Not enough to dim the bright shine of star-glimmer, but enough to dull it for a moment – new and unbecoming to her. She thinks of her dark-skinned lover, haunted and untamed. And she thinks of how her heart is bound to break. She thinks of how she is cursed to love too easily, and yet never stay tethered to any one place. She envies him that.
”No” she answers truthfully, and there is longing in the soft sea-spray of her voice. ”They are not”
The world never did favor the dreamers.