Liet doesn't remember his life before his DNA changed. The loss of an entire three years causes him no pain, either. He doesn't feel anything at all, actually. Mostly, he wanders, mildly confused and only following his instinctual need for both food and water.
When his body starts changing involuntarily, he catches little snippets of memory in the midst of those changes. A mother that he vaguely resembles flashes behind his face as his hooves change to paws and teeth to fangs. A whisper about a father to him and many others as scales flash over his body and wings sprout from his back. Distant, visiting siblings as he falls into the form of a squeaking, tiny rodent.
Then there are the trees. When he walks amongst them, he feels an empty echo in his chest. A vibration, like the spreading of a bell. Sometimes, he presses himself against a dogwood and he almost feels something. When he thought he was sensing dread and remorse, he shifted once again. This time, his thoughts die and bark and branches and wide, white flowers sway in the breeze. A dogwood with a streak of pink down the middle of its trunk. There, he was stuck for six months. Only today has he returned to a horse, the form he feels most comfortable in.
Liet chokes, golden eyes peering up at the too-bright sun above him. He thinks that meant something to him as a tree. That he needed it. A tear forms in the corner of his eye.
"What am I?"
open :-)
Moira rarely leaves the saltwater, but today she weaves through the kelp at the Rivermouth and makes her way upstream. Acionna had sworn to her that this waterway led all the way through to the ocean on the other side, and today Moira means to find out if her hatchmate had been telling the truth.
Like most waterways that are not her tropical home, the River is chilly against her sleek grey hide and scales. But it is water, and so she feels at home, and makes her way upstream with all the ease of a creature born to. And she had been, after all. She is a daughter of the ocean.
Not a daughter a very good sense of direction though, for when the river branches off, the young nereid follows the narrower but warmer rivulet that comes from the Forest rather than the wide snow-melt from Hyaline.
Eventually she grows suspicious of her location, and lifts her head above the water.
It is a strange stroke of luck that she does so just as the stallion asks the sun what he is.
“You know they can’t hear you when they’re up that high, right?” she asks, thinking of Helion the Sun. “Maybe you should go west and wait for them to set and ask again?” The nereid is attempting to be helpful, and to do that requires speaking, which means using her song to ensure her voice does not grate at his ears here above the water.
@ liet
Liet doesn't notice the stranger, not at first. He is too entranced in the sun, too caught up in his own self-reflection to notice the splashing of another. Wide, golden eyes almost a perfect reflection of the sun blink upward and away, years and years in the past. This present, amongst nereids and babbling water, is too much after six months as a tree.
That's why he startles when Moira's voice sings in his direction. Liet snaps his head around, stepping delicately away from the riverbank's lining of trees and peering curiously in her direction. His eyes narrow in concentration as he walks closer, a magic shimmer suddenly rising like heatwaves from his coat. It only takes a few moments more for Liet to spot the nereid's head above water. His chest begins to pound with the force of shifting he has yet to control, forcing him to stop with only one hoof in the water. He starts, attempting to distract his body from its shivering desire to change:
"Oh, yeah? Isn't it just another ocean horizon I won't be able to reach out west?"
But it doesn't work, for the thought of Tephra and all its tropical inhabitants reminds him of the swimming girl before him. Liet stumbles forward so the water might catch him as he changes: a nereid, pink and dappled with galaxies, something else all the way down to his (now her) gender.
"Oh," she says, blinking. Her voice is feminine and beautiful beneath the water's surface. "Can you come back down here?" Liet asks politely, face peering up at Moira.
@ Moira here i am ten years later
08-24-2021, 07:22 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-24-2021, 07:24 PM by Moira.)
Her voice had startled him, Moira is sure of it. But not too much, because he’s coming closer, so she begins to smile. When he step into the water she comes nearer, wading into the shallows. She can’t draw him too far, Moira knows, he might lose his footing and be swept away by the cold current.
“I think you’d do better up in the mountains, closer to the sky.” She says, and is about to suggest Hyaline when the stallion stumbles forward.
He’s moving toward the water, not toward her, so Moira frowns. She couldn’t be drawing him in with her song, but what…
The equine body in front of her shifts to something much more familiar. The shock on Moira’s face is joined by delight, impressed at the shift and the almost instinctive joy of a nereid at the presence of another.
“That was so lovely,” she compliments the pink mare when she joins her beneath the water. “I’d no idea you were a nereid at all - your land form even looked like a stallion!” Moira is still young, and her experience with stallions was minimal.
“I’m Moira, by the way. From the Ischian reef. Where are you from?” Moira is sure she would have remembered seeing a nereid with colors as pretty as these, so she must be from a distant waterway.
@ liet
@ liet
oh hello!
Liet is watching the smokey nereid with eyes full of wonder and curiosity. She blinks once, then twice—then glances down at her newly acquired fins and scales. A small haze covers her mind as the effects of such magic settle into her muscles. “Lovely,” she parrots, not quite ready to look back up but once again surprised by the pleasant gentleness of her voice.
“Well, I am—” Liet begins, but stops short when she looks up and finds delight in Moira’s eyes. The other nereid accepts Liet so quickly that she almost believes she is one, for just a moment. A soft, dazzled smile splits the shifter’s face and she leans closer to study Moira’s own glittering scales. She longs to be where she might belong, and a lie slips out far too easily:
“I’ve always preferred the cold water, I stay by the oceans in Nerine.”
Liet smiles, warming beneath Moira’s approval. She dares to swim a little downstream, hoping her movements looked more fluid and practiced than they felt.
“My name is Liet. I’ve yet to visit the Ischian reefs. What are they like?”
@ Moira
The pink nereid strikes Moira as somewhat odd, but the younger girl is not at all perturbed. The ocean is filled with oddities, after all, with things strange and wonderful. And lovely too, which the newly finned pegasus repeats to herself.
At the half finished phrase, Moira’s dark head tilts in curiosity, and she waits for the rest of the answer.
Liet is from the North, she says, and Moira wonders if perhaps that is why she is a little strange. Her mother has said that different lands have different customs, and perhaps that is true even for nerieds from other lands as well. Perhaps they are like the ice - cool and withdrawn. The image appeals to her, and she smiles happily at Liet, who is now swimming downstream.
Moira joins her, taking a position in Liet’s slipstream without conscious thought, enjoying the lack of resistance and the occasional brush of Liet’s fins against her (and vice versa) as they move through the water. She chatters as they go, the soft bubbles of her speech tickle at her gills and throat.
“Oh they are wonderful! The sea is pretty shallow around the islands, and between the seagrass meadows are huge reefs of every kind of coral.” She describes some of these as they go, including her favorite to rest on - the table corals. “What’s Nerine like?”
@ liet
Liet listens to Moira contentedly, finding pleasure in the resistance the current of the river gives her swimming. She quite likes the way her body naturally slips into water, unlike when she once accidentally sprang into a bird and nearly killed herself trying to fly. Liet will never forget that kind of panic: the sensation of sitting lazily as a panther upon a tree branch ripped away by the size-change of a hawk. She had looked down, taut wings shivering nervously against her. When she fell, after being stuck to the branch and unable to shift for thirty minutes, the only thing that had saved her had been that shifting instinct woven into her DNA.
“I’ve never seen a seagrass meadow,” Liet admits, not thinking about what scenery she must have lived by if she is to continue maintaining her facade as a nereid. She glances back at Moira, quickly realizing she knows nothing of the sea but tries to imagine what life in the North would be like, anyway.
“The sea is rough and the cliffs are sharp.” She doesn’t elaborate, for all she thinks of after is how she imagines the Nerine sea to be drab and gray and—what if Moira were to ever actually take a look? The thought of Liet's new friend thinking she is a liar twists an ache into her gut. So she smiles prettily and glances back again. The gold in her eyes glimmers.
“Would you take me to Ischia? I want to see all the colorful coral.”
Moira’s grasp of her abilities has been progressive and expected. She has known what she was since the moment she broke free of the protective casing of her egg and took her first swallow of the sea. There are no frightened memories associated with learning to shift, and only the development of her siren song had been even mildly disconcerting. Now that, too, she has learned to control, or so she tells herself.
Never seen a seagrass meadow?
Moira’s estimation of Nerine sinks greatly. A place without meadows is a place unwelcoming to her kind, and she glances at Liet with renewed interest. What type of creature must she be beneath her lovely facade? Is she rough and sharp as well?
No, Moira thinks as she returns Liet’s smile with a bright and amiable one of her own. She seems the nice type. The type who would truly enjoy Ischia, Moira decides.
So when Liet asks, Moira nods happily.
“There’s nothing I’d like more.” She replies, drifting closer to the pink nereid for a moment, and enjoying the way Liet’s fins tickle along her sides, and the warmth of her skin in the cool water. It’s been a while since Moira has swam with another, and it makes her miss her mother and sister with a sharp and sudden ache.
@ liet
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