"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
At first, she does not recognize Helion. His wings catch her attention first, brilliant and golden, with feathers so bright she lowers her long lashes for a moment until her eyes adjust. When she raises them, her purple eyes are lit with pleasure, having seen the golden hair and the face of the little wet sun she’d left beside the creek last summer.
Not wet today, and no longer so little she thinks, looking up to meet his gaze. The horns are new, and she looks at them appreciatively for a moment. A happy smile remains on her scaled face and in her amethyst eyes as she meets his gaze and says with a curious raise of her gold and purple brow:
“So you can fly now?” She asks, having come close enough to speak without shouting once she’s recognized him. The young nereid has often longed for the ability to fly, but she is practical enough to know that wings are of little use below the water. Wings are for those who walk on the earth, she’d tell herself when she longed too hard for another taste of flight like Grandmother had given her last winter.
A nereid does not need wings.
But she does stare longingly (and admiringly) at Helion’s for a moment longer before continuing: “How much longer till it’ll be you I see up there?”
Moira gestures toward the sun overhead, just past midday on the longest day of the summer. Memories of last year’s Midsummer Festival had been on her mind of late. They’re responsible for her presence on land today, when any other she’d be far beneath the sea. It is difficult to adopt a relaxed pose with such limited directional movement, but Moira makes do. She leans to one side as she looks him over curiously to see what else might have changed about the sun.
Helion had often hoped to see Moira again - eager to figure out a way to get her back for her small prank. He’d occasionally stuck his head below water whenever he was lurking in a pond or lake, or the ocean near Loess, and checked to see if she would come swimming up and say hello. He’d been rather disappointed to discover that he had not hatched, as she had once asked, and there were no shining metallic eggshells that he could show her as proof.
His had been just a regular, ordinary birth with a regular, ordinary twin that followed. Sure they had both turned out to be some sort of horse slash celestial body hybrids but still - no eggs.
A smile is easy for the horned youth to find when he recognizes her, still pretty - still looking a little out of place when she’s standing on land. They’re near the river, though, and he’ll have to keep an eye out for any more waterbombs she may send his way. Though in the bright midsummer light, a splash would not be totally unwelcome.
He ruffles his golden feathers when his silver eyes notice her looking, not immune to the joy that attention brings, and a warm laugh escapes him when he follows her gaze up to the sun and the sky overhead.
“Why Fish, I can go up there now if you’re that eager for me to be away from you. I can fly now.” It was still a relatively recent skill that he had (almost) mastered but that still counts as far as he's concerned. And he doesn't need to tell her those specifics.
Moira does not often leave the tropical reef she calls home, except to lounge upon the white sand beaches or leap from the peak of the island’s tallest waterfall.
The jump always comes with a glorious sensation in her belly as she falls, and she suspects that is what Helion must feel too, swooping and diving through the sky. How delightful, that they both have access to worlds that the other cannot enter, and yet they have this place on land to come together.
“No, don’t go,” she laughs as she says it, and even though her above-the-water voice is shrill, the amusement softens it to something tolerable (at least to her own ears). It occurs to her that perhaps she can do something to make it sound better, and that she likes Helion enough to try.
Her kingfisher companion (perched several yards downstream, looking for a meal) has told her that her voice sounds more pleasant when she is practicing her singing, so she decides to try that.
“Hey does my voice sound nicer when I talk like this?” The words are neutral, but the tone she uses beckons anyone within earshot, the sound of her voice pulling them in like a well cast net.
Helion’s grin turns dazzling when she laughs and tells him not to go - as he had hoped. It would have been sad to be shooed away so soon into their reunion. As always, it delights him to have coaxed a laugh out of someone - and he does not know if this is something he inherited from his parents or if there is something about being a piece of the sun that rejoices at amusement and joy in others.
When she speaks again, his smile turns a little hazy but it does not fade. Her question pulls at him, actually pulls at him. He takes a step closer, his silver eyes dancing a little as he looks at her. “Yeah.” He says and it’s a soft word, but it sounds a little high-pitch - like the voice of a boy. And when she talks like that he doesn’t want to sound like a child.
So he lowers his voice, overshooting a little bit for the next few words. “I mean yes.” Yeah, a little too deep, there, so he gives up, clearing his throat and his voice levels out as he continues. “It sounds very nice now.”
His head clears enough that he wonders if his response is insulting to say that her voice sounded better now than it had before - even though that is exactly what she had asked. So he adds hurriedly, not wanting to get the answer wrong. “It did before too but… it especially did that second time.”
@Helion comes nearer, and Moira’s dark mouth turns up into a smile, because surely he wouldn’t have done that if her voice were truly grating in his ears. He gives her verbal confirmation as well, and she thinks nothing of the tone of his voice until he speaks again, and it is noticeably deeper.
She is so intrigued by the difference that she doesn’t think any of the words themselves, and is puzzled (but pleasantly so) by his rush to explain.
“I’m using my Song,” Moira tells him, her siren song, the one that she’s been practicing. She begins to tell him that it draws others in, but realizes that perhaps he already knows this. He’s come closer, after all, nearer to her and the water.
The pleasure of having made her voice more pleasant merges with the satisfaction of successful magic working, and she laughs aloud, the emotion bubbling out of her without shame as she throws her head back.
“This is so cool!-” She says, looking back down at Helion with an excited gleam in her violet eyes. It doesn’t occur to her that continued singing will draw him ever nearer, so she chatters on: “What’ve you been up to? Have you had any good adventures lately?”
Although she hadn’t been actually singing, Helion accepts that her “Song” is an accurate enough description and he nods like he understands exactly what she’s saying - and maybe it’s only a little because he wants her to keep talking. He wonders what it would be like if she actually sang using it, and decides that might be too powerful. The whole Meadow might come flocking over and Helion thinks there’s only so close he can get to her without being rude about it. As it is, he’s already glancing around to see if anyone else is around - both wanting to share this beautiful noise with someone else and hoping no one else comes over to steal his friend.
She laughs, which is an equally enchanting noise, and although he doesn’t understand why - his smile brightens, glad that whatever is happening is brightening Moira’s day a little.
Without her Singing, Helion would have enthusiastically told her any nonsense stories without hesitation. Now, he pauses, thinking - trying to figure out which of them would be the best to share. Certainly not the one where he had been stuck in a tree while learning to fly, that was no good. Definitely not the one where he had been stung on the nose by a bee that had resented the fact that the flower it was on got sucked into Helion’s nostril as the colt slept. He had been swollen forever! It was hardly his fault that plants seemed to angle towards him when he was still for too long.
He’d like to impress Moira, as he takes another step closer when he begins to speak. “Oh you know, little ones here and there. No one’s dumped water on my head recently.” He tilts his head a little to the side as he says this, that smile of his still bright. “My family did move to Loess! Which is pretty neat. The sky is very big there and there’s these cool turtles that carry around plants and glow. I tried to catch one but my dad said it wasn’t very nice to try to keep it on land.” His silver eyes dance as a thought comes to him and he reaches out to nudge her playfully. “Kinda like you, I guess!”
The sun brightens, and Moira’s face and heart glow with the warmth of it. She is not a coldblooded creature, but she feels a sudden affinity to them, wants to bask in the light and feel it warm her to her bones. It’s his version of a Song, she thinks to herself, and feels exceptionally pleased that she’d gotten to see it happen.
“You are very charming.” She tells him, casting him a look that is both pleased and mildly suspicious. “My mother has told me to watch out for folks that seem too charming.” Her mother had specified further of course, that the folks she was watching out for were the captive kelpie and any of his kin.
Surely her mother wouldn’t have told her to watch out for Helion. He is a sun after all, bright and burning. Moira finds herself moving about him not unlike a flower, eager to see his smiling face. He is kind, she’s learned, though she has suspected as much after the easy forgiveness of her water prank.
“What’s Loess like?” She asks curiously, having heard of the red canyon land but never seen it herself. She should go more places, the nereid thinks, see more things. She’s nearly grown, after all, and she can protect herself from danger. Maybe she’ll go to Loess, Moira thinks, because surely there cannot be danger in the home of the sun.
Helion straightens a little when Moira calls him charming, though he deflates as soon as he catches the suspicion in her words and the comment about her mother. Well, it wouldn’t do any good if he went along trying to impress his fish friend only for that to be the very thing that drives her away! “Should I be less charming then? Would your mom like me better?”
He is mostly joking, his smile says, but he might try if she says it will help.
“It’s pretty cool! I haven’t explored it all yet but a lot of the plants are short so the sky is big and I think that’s why my dad liked it to start but it works pretty well for me too. There’s tons of water there too, all these hot and cold springs you can just hang in and soak.”
A good place for a fish to visit, he thinks, and he’s about to suggest it when he realizes he’s not even sure where she’s from. He knew she had hatched, and had a sister, and could turn into that horse-fish-thing, and apparently has a mom that doesn’t like charming people, but could not remember if she had told him about where she called home. “Where do you live?” And then he gets another (charming) idea and shakes his head with a little laugh and shining silver eyes “Wait wait, you live at the bottom of the ocean, don’t you?”
“She might,” Moira replies, but she says the words with doubt. “But I like that you are charming. The smile she gives him after is also charming, and manages to convey a rather clear ‘and isn’t that more important than what my mother might want?’
She is soon enraptured in what he has to tell of Loess, and its short plants and large sky. A large sky is important for a sun and his moon sister, Moira thinks, so it is fitting that they settle there. She has never considered the size of the sky in Ischia, and reminds herself to check when she returns.
“Those sound really cool,” she tells him, “Maybe I can come swim in them someday?”
At his question, she shakes her head with amusement. ”I live in the coral reefs of Ischia! she says with a laugh, and unlike her voice, that sound does not need modification to be pleasant above the waves.
“I definitely don’t live at the bottom of the ocean!” The thought of being at the true Bottom, in the blackness where the sea floor sinks into shadows, makes an involuntary shudder run down her golden spine. She is a creature of the shallow seas - it is her sister and her kraken glow who swims in the Depths.
Moira prefers the bright colors and warm waters of the tropical shallows, and she is rarely away from them long. These conversations with Helion have been an exception, and though she has found she dries rather quickly in his company, Moira does not mind the sensation.
That Moira likes that he is charming is the more important thing, and his silver eyes dance at this response - clearly pleased with it even though he also knows not to underestimate mothers. Especially if Moira’s was anything like his own.
Though he had been distracted by other thoughts before he could invite Moira to come check out the various waters Loess had to offer, she brings it up and he is eager to agree - already thinking that he could introduce her to Cressida and then all three of them could have some fun. Or maybe Cressida would just “You definitely should!” There didn’t seem to be too many others that swam around in the Loess waters - just the occasional dip - and they could use some proper swimming, now that he thought about it. Plus it would be a good excuse to see more of Moira and that was definitely something this young boy would like.
Even though it had mostly been joking about the bottom of the ocean, he's glad that Moira laughs at his quesetion and that she doesn't live down there. He wouldn't be able to visit her if she did! “I guess it would be pretty dark down there. And you’d be farther away from the sun.” His bright grin makes it pretty clear which sun he's talking about (the best one).
He's not sure what a coral reef looks like but he's picturing sunny waters since she said it wasn't the depths, so he gets there anyway. And thinking about water encourages another thought - still spoken with a bright grin as he looks at her. “I’ve been practicing my swimming, you know. Just in case you try to drown me again.”
