N y x a

When she wakes, the gist of their last moment together has been wiped clean. Nyxa remembers the backwards tug of Maugrim’s water-fist, she can recall that he’d been amused … nothing more. How long has she been out?

Her tongue moves; curves up to press against the roof of her mouth where it can discern grit and muck. There’s the comforting hardness of something beneath her, (maybe the earth?) and with her eyes still clamped shut against reality, Nyxa moves her head slowly. It’s sand that cradles her body - she’d know the sensation of it anywhere. Sand and water, her two great loves and now, her prison.

With a broken heart she blinks away the darkness.

God it’s beautiful down here. So quiet and warm. The underbelly of curious fish give movement to the otherwise still sea, a glint of light here and there striking brilliantly off their scales as they flash and flit about. Motionless and prostrate on her side Nyxa tries to sing to them but her voice can’t seem to rise to the occasion; her throat hurts like hell. So they swim away.

The clarity and familiarity of this particular patch of ocean doesn’t begin to sink in until she raises her sore neck to take a look around. Before her, the blue expanse stretches on into darkness; behind her, the sharp incline of a reef crest rises like a natural wall to ring an island. “I know this place,” She thinks, hardly willing to believe it but her heart thumps wildly in response, “he didn’t know.”

The pink of the coral is the sweetest color to her right now, and there! Just there a lazy brown shark glides from the shadows, his dark pattern of brown rings a twin to the rough patches of skin Nyxa sports on each of her points. She knows that if she were to top that foreboding wall, there’d be a flat shelf with the dangerous reef waiting. Past those would be the lagoon (her lagoon) and then the waiting shore … and Hod.

“Hod,” She croaks, and then she screams, “Maugrim!” because she knows he’s somewhere lurking. 

He didn’t kill her, (though he should’ve) and now she wants answers.

Every kiss is a door, Can I knock on yours?

N y x a

Maugrim’s phantom arrival causes her gut more revulsion than Deathwish’s eventual rot. The way he names her (such a lack of imagination), the way he fixes two awkward wings to her side without much care for accuracy or beauty - he is a sloppy God; content with dragging her to the shoreline of her beloved Island, the same place her mother had breathed such life back into.

But she is not her mother, nor is the woman who rushes to greet them with the pestilence of death at her heels. Nyxa, still dazed and not entirely sure what’s become of her life, can’t seem to answer the strange broodmare because she is fixated on the way Deathwish leaves trails of ruin on Ischia’s beautiful landscape. A feeling distracts her; something like indigestion or the pressure of building flatulence, but she cannot find the time or the breath to comment on this either.

Nothing rouses a response from her hardened lips until she watches the two (whose matching coats give her reason to pause) come together. Maugrim, lord of the ocean and water itself, is quick to placate the thick-bodied female at his side with a kiss reminiscent of the one he shadowed beneath her own jaw just moments before. Nyxa cannot say why, but she quirks her mouth into a disbelieving smirk and coughs, “Are you her lapdog, then?”

She’d been wrong about his knowledge, why should she be so surprised that Maugrim lacks the ability to even be his own sort of demon? “It’s that absence of imagination you were thinking of earlier,” her conscious supplies inwardly, lacking the fear Nyxa was so tightly bound with. The thought causes her grin to freeze. “Forgive me,” She says, though she knows full well that she doesn’t mean it. Her legs work hard to lift her sodden body upwards, the weight of saltwater and the clinging brine of the sea cascading over her supple shoulders as she tries hard to ignore the sharp pangs in her belly.

“I was looking for Maugrim because he brought me here, of course.” Nyxa says, her breathing labored as the tangle of her dark forelock settles over the curve of her brow. “And I wanted to thank him for bringing me home. Obviously.” She concludes, her teeth grinding against each other. The water filly doesn’t find it hard to meet Deathwish’s eyes when she says this; they were truthful statements in a sense. It’s when her purple gaze slides sideways to land on her counterpart, Nyxa’s jailer, that the growing girl’s eyes darken with the hint of secrecy.

“Why are you looking for Maugrim?” She starts again, the fine point of her nose jerking back to face the muted gray woman.

Every kiss is a door, Can I knock on yours?