we will tame the vicious seas; lior

She calls it the Unbecoming, the day the old world died. For many, it was devastating; it was the end of the beautiful lives they had built around themselves, the splintering of something comforting, something familiar. They had been torn from family and friend, scattered across a land that was new and unrecognizable – terrifying in its strangeness. They had been pulled from homes, and those homes had been ruined in their wake, undone and then used as the bones of a new society. It had been so much change, too much new, and it overwhelmed them.

For Syrine, it was different.

When the world unhinged, when the magic in the mountain pulled her to it, she was set free. The Cove had always been home, home from the very first moment she opened her eyes and swallowed the scent of ocean brine. But home and comfort were two very different things. She cannot remember her mother, and she never knew her father, no gentle caress from warm, satin lips. But she will always remember that soft shade of purple and how the color looked when it was edged so carefully in stark white lines. She will always remember how it felt with his mouth against her skin, and his iron buried like blades in the thrum of her veins. At first, she had not understood why it always rained on her, why the sun never split the cloud above her head to dry the steel and tawny of her delicate back. But he was eager to show her why, eager, when he drew patterns in her pretty flesh, ribbons of red against the white and grulla. It was because the world wept for her –because even the sky grew weary of watching such things.

But then one day the mountain reached for her (it reached for everyone, she is not special) but she was plucked from his grasp, hidden somewhere beyond the reach of purple and iron. At first she had not understood, could not fathom an existence that lacked violet and violence, but then the rain had gone and she found it easier to believe. If the sky did not weep for her still, surely she must be as new and changed as the rest of the world. Then, when those wings had unfurled from the knots of muscle on either side of her shoulders, as soft and gray as the storm clouds that had been her childhood shadow, she knew for certain that this world would be better.

She picks her way through the meadow, burying herself among the red and gold of autumn, grateful that the wildflowers have all wilted in the cooler weather, that there is no pale purple to watch her pass. Her wings are tucked against her back, soft and grey, and she is used to their weight now, used to their warmth where once there was only the cold, endless tears of a torn open sky. Where she walks at the edge of the meadow, following just outside the line of shadow cast by the trees from the forest at its edge, the grass is tall and untrampled. Her lips brush the stalks, not tasting, but memorizing the texture of bristling gold, smiling when the wind pulls them from her reach. The Cove did not have such grass. The salt from the sea had tempered everything, and the vegetation had been short and dull and dry.

There is a sound to her left, a sound from the shadows beneath the nearby trees, and she turns to face it with eyes wide and blue and glacial, framing a white face freckled with bits of soot and steel. Her wings tighten around her sides as she searches the dark, waiting for the dull gleam of iron or the flash of lavender. But neither comes, so foolishly, slowly, she takes one hesitant step toward the trees.

“Is someone there?” Her voice is like a chime, soft and resonant when the wind carries the words away.

syrine