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[open] to become a melody without a name; any - Printable Version

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to become a melody without a name; any - Eridya - 09-11-2026

to become a melody without a name

There is an untethered sort of peace held within the crashing waves and salt-laden scent of the ocean. It is a peace many have felt, and even more, admired. An overwhelming sense of dangerous freedom with each crest and roll of the unsettled water. The pull is undeniable, drawing creatures like locusts to a perfectly golden field of wheat.

For Eridya, it is intimate. As much a part of her as the air is to the birds or the earth is to a worm. The sea is her birthright, linked so intricately to her that it may as well be the blood rushing inside her veins. So for her to leave it makes this day an auspicious one, even if few would ever know it.

Auspicious, yet entirely unsurprising. Like the winter storms that tear through and ravage the lands, she rarely stays in one place long. For a creature of the sea, land holds an undeniable fascination in the same way the restless depths do for creatures of the land. Fortune must truly have smiled on her to allow her a freedom so few others have, for Eridya is a creature who can traverse one as easily as the other.

Her translucent skin glimmers in the weak light of the sun, the water sluicing from her sleek form, sending rainbows cascading across each curve and hollow. Her tail swishes sharply as she steps fully from the lapping waves, a shower of seawater spreading across the beach with the practiced movement. Her slender gills flutter and widen as she familiarizes herself with breathing air once more.

It is a mildly unpleasant process for the brisk air to chase the fluid from her lungs, but she endures with the disinterest of familiarity. It is the price she must pay to walk so completely in two worlds, and it is one she will gladly surrender. Perhaps it is foolish of her to be so certain, but she retains no doubt this venture, and thus the price she just paid, will prove well worth her while.

eridya



RE: to become a melody without a name; any - son - 09-13-2026

Here is what he wonders most: could he have begged for his life?
If he’d pleaded with the dark magician who’d led him into the woods, would he have spared his life?

Which inevitably leads him to wonder: would it have been a life worth living?
Which inevitably leads him to conclude: no.

But that is not to say that this one is either. This life of a creature who has only just climbed out of the water, still dripping, regardless of how many days, weeks, months it’s been since he so much as approached a body of water.

He is a thing of the water just as she is a thing of the water.
But while it is a thing that surges through her veins, it is a thing that stilled the blood in his. The water curls sweetly in her lungs and then dissipates while it lays stagnant in his, permanent, no matter how he might try and cough it up. She comes alive in the water while he had merely died there, but the water itself is no less a part of him.

She is vibrant. This another difference between them. For he is dull, Son. Dull in the milky eyes, the algae that clings, that waterlogged flesh around his mouth, how it shifts when he speaks.

He has not gone into the water since he’d dragged himself out of it (and it was not this water but some forest-dark pond miles from here, a place he has not been able to bring himself to return to), yet still he drips. Drips while he watches her. Drips while he tilts his head. Drips when he lifts his head and says, “the water loves you.” And perhaps, should one listen close enough, they might hear an accusation. But there is no anger on the thing’s face as he considers her. There is no expression at all.

- SON



RE: to become a melody without a name; any - Eridya - 09-25-2026

to become a melody without a name

If there is one thing any creature of the sea knows well, it is just how cruel the depths can be. Water is rarely kind. It does not care for what might get lost beneath the surface, nor what might fail to rise again. Death lingers in the ancient sands beneath its cool embrace. A death that consumes anything unlucky enough to become entrenched, all sins erased by the swift passage of time.

For a creature to be claimed by such a death, yet rise again anyway, something both great and terrible must have occurred.

Even knowing this, Eridya does not watch the creature staring at her with revulsion. Perhaps she should, for it is entirely unnatural, but only curiosity stirs in her chest. To find a thing whose life the water had claimed yet somehow could not manage to keep is a strange thing indeed, and she, ever unwise, only wants to know more. To understand that which she will never truly know.

Her gills flare as she breathes in the murky scent of stagnancy. The sea she had just climbed from is rarely, if ever, still, so she recognizes this as foreign water.

She tilts her head slightly when he speaks, his simple statement only aggravating the hunger for understanding inside her. The untamed saltwater might love her, but she is quite certain whatever depths he had climbed from would not. She steps forward, sharp eyes fixed on the creature before her, as though her unwavering stare could draw all his secrets with will alone.

“That may be true,” she responds, her voice barely above a murmur, as though what she is saying is little more than an afterthought. “But it has never tried to claim me the way it did you.”

eridya



RE: to become a melody without a name; any - son - 09-27-2026

He has become accustomed to this body.
Cumbersome, waterlogged, bloated.
Ugly, damp, dripping. The algae that hangs from his matted forelock, his knotted tail, what remains of his mane.
The way the skin shifts when he moves, when he speaks, the way the milk-white eyes cannot always hold their focus no matter how he might will them to.

Which is to say that he is accustomed, now, to the way they turn from him. How they hold their breath as if that might spare them the stench of him, how they cast away their eyes so they will not have to look at him. How they scurry, as if death is contagious, as if he might drag them to the depths, too.

But she does not turn from him, nor is there malice in her gaze as she studies him. He might have recognized that look in her eye as intrigue had he ever seen it before. But it is alien to him, the concept of interest, that concept that she might look at him and see something worth looking at.

Strangest of all, she comes closer. He goes on looking, slack-jawed, dripping. Son knows absolutely nothing of love, but it makes sense to him that, should the water love her, it would not destroy her in this way. She calls it claiming, he calls it something else entirely. He smiles, though it is mirthless, and the mouth moves in some unnatural way, slipping at the edges, wet.

“No, it did not do this because it loved me,” he tells her. Just as the father had not led him to the water’s edge because he loved him. He understands hate, Son, he understands darkness. He understands that there are things, too, that he will never understand and why Jamie led him into the water is one of them. “Consider yourself lucky.”

- SON



RE: to become a melody without a name; any - Eridya - 10-05-2026

to become a melody without a name

Her head tilts at his words, vibrant teal locks tripping over still-damp skin. She had never thought much about luck at all. Is it luck, to live as she does? Love, she understands well enough, but luck? If it is a thing as capricious as love, then she isn’t sure she wants it.

“Why do you say it is lucky?” she asks nearly immediately, before pausing to actually consider. Her lips quirk, then, a moment later, she adds, “Do you believe it is lucky to be loved?”

She cannot know what he understands of love, only what she has known to be true. Eridya has been loved, though perhaps not in the way most would recognize it. After all, the sea is cruel, and so are the creatures that call it home.

For Eridya, love was a mother who taught her to navigate the water, to hunt, and to survive. It is a mother who had found her worthy enough, and chose not to end her existence at birth. The weak do not survive the depths, and it is better to reclaim those nutrients than waste energy on offspring that would not thrive anyway. That she stands here now is a testament to that love.

But it certainly had not been kind. She had suffered for that love, and she had grown strong because of it. Beneath the ethereal beauty of her shimmering facade lay a creature vicious enough to call the sea home, all because love had taught her what that meant.

She steps closer, uncaring of the way he drips with the muddy stench of rot. Uncaring of the shifting skin and milk-white gaze of the dead. She had seen far worse trapped within the water’s unkind embrace. She knew the sand was filled with remnant fragments of bone, all that remained of those that fed the seaweed and crustaceans when the waves stole their last breaths.

She smiles then, a gentle, lovely thing entirely belied by the sharpness of her sea-bright eyes. “Have you never considered it might be the other way around?”

eridya