It was a beautiful morning on the island, and Aquaria had spent most of it floating peacefully in the bay. The water cooled her itchy skin, and softened the fins at her crest and tail until they rippled like gauze on the water's surface. All together, she was feeling more like herself after the previous day's hours on shore.
Every so often, she kicked her legs, pushing herself back toward the beach when the water tried to drag her back into its saline embrace. It was tempting, certainly, but she'd decided to see what the shore had to offer, so she'd stay. What she'd seen so far had been promising. Lovely scents, food that came in more flavors than "salted" and "brined".
It was pretty too, in its own way. She still prefered the jewel bright abstraction of her reef garden, the way tiny fish would dart between her legs and around her head like silver halos. She'd asked a lemon shark friend to mind things while she was away, but she'd have to go check on things in a few days. Hopefully the new clutch of baby damslefish weren't getting bullied. She'd spoken firmly with the pipefish, but the silly creature didn't always listen...
The train of thought continued this way for some time, lulled by the rocking of the waves and the gentle heat of the sun on her pearl scales. She was almost asleep when the feeling of no longer being alone roused her. The baroque weight of her neck rose dripping from the surf, glowingly violet eyes alighting on her visitor.
what is left when honor is lost?
Some days, when the winds have been especially in his favor and made his patrol quick, Pteron heads out to sea.
Northeast of the Taiga’s northern shoreline, cold air from the Icicle Isle meets warm from the Tephran volcano and slips underneath it. Pteron likes to follow it, his pale wings lifted high in the drafts as he soars without effort. He’s made it halfway over the Icicle Isle without a single beat of his wings before, and today he’s chosen to go the opposite direction for the very first time.
North is a known entity – Taiga remains a territory of the salt and iron Nerine and sister to the frozen island. But the East is an unknown – a place he has not dreamed of entering since the death of his younger sibling. Pteron still has no intention of venturing toward the Volcano, and he sweeps wide from that part of the mainland and instead travels over the myriad of islands. The two largest are the Resort and Ischia, the stallion knows, but cannot differentiate them. He sweeps lower, the humid air rising off the islands luring him like a siren’s song.
He should know better than to be surprised when he finds a true siren sunning itself in the clear water.
Pteron knows in the back of his mind that he probably shouldn’t land here, but he is impossibly curious about the lovely creature floating in the sea. That curiosity makes him more reckless than he might otherwise be, and after only a moment of hesitation he decides to dive into the sea.
It is not his wisest choice, and the shock of the salt water shakes off the invisibility he’d been holding onto for the entirety of his flight. The sudden appearance of a larger creature plummeting towards them terrifies a silver fish, and it has barely enough time to dark out of his way. The dive itself was not inelegant, but Pteron has never attempted anything quite like this before, and the bob to the surface that he’s seen kingfishers do is apparently impossible for an equine body. Instead, he splutters to the surface again with a great deal of spluttering and coughing and useless beating of his wings.
“That landing was a lot better in my head,” he says aloud, both to himself and to the sea creature, whose gaze he seeks out now that he treads water. “You might even have been impressed, if I pulled it off right.” The dun stallion grins at himself and at the violet eyed creature. He blinks, almost startled at the shade on an unfamiliar face, but they serve only to enhance his enchantment with this unfamiliar creature. “Are you a kelpie, then, floating out here in the sea?”
@[Aquaria]
The feeling of no longer being alone was short, quickly replaced by undeniable proof when a miniature tidal wave washed over her, obscuring her vision. Blinking away droplets of the sea, she smiled openly at the blue and white winged figure as it popped to the surface like a bubble.
"Vita!" She whinnied, thinking it was her new young friend come to call. That thought was immediately dashed as the water cleared from her vision, and a very non-girlish voice emerged from the sputtering horse. Her smile faded slightly as warmth crept up her neck. "Not Vita." She muttered behind her teeth, trying not to giggle while he regained his bearings.
Her commitment to not laugh evaporated as he started talking. "Much better than I could have done, I'm sure." She chuckled lightly, nodding to her wingless shoulders. "Practice it a bit more and you've got a very good chance of impressing me." Her grin was directed mostly at the rippling water beneath her nose, but it was broad. Until he asked if she was a kelpie. As if!
Her head tossed proudly, throwing a scattering of water into the air. "Haven't you ever seen a nereid before?" She asked, dismayed. "Kelpies are mainly fresh water dwellers. They're sharp toothed tricksters. Nereids, we're salt water creatures, and peaceful, mostly. We have better control over the water, too." She described, somewhat biased. Just for fun, the sea mare decided to throw in a little demonstration.
Smiling with one brow crooked, she focused on the rhythm of the water all around her, grabbing onto the flow of it and bending it to her will. Arcs of salt water geysered up from the surf, one after another, until a clear bubble of water curved over their heads. Sunlight filtered in rippling rays to land on them, and the sounds of the day grew muted from beyond her creation.
She held it just for a few seconds, just long enough, and then let the whole thing come splashing down on them. She laughed at herself, shining with her mane slicked down her neck and shoulder. "Now that was exactly how I pictured it in my head!" She exclaimed once the water had mostly calmed again.
@[Pteron]
what is left when honor is lost?
She is enchanting, and if Pteron had made any effort to tear his eyes from her, he thinks that he mgiht find that an impossible task. Her coat – no, her scales, he realizes – remind him of the oyster hearts that make up the grey shore of Taiga, gleaming and smooth. Pteron wants to feel them, to know if they are as sleek as the inner shells; he wants a great many things when it comes to the Nereid. He is neither agile nor especially mobile here in the sea, but he manages to bob a little closer as she tels him that with practice he might impress her.
He intends to practice a thousand times a day.
His query into her kelpie nature seems to have sparked disdain, and she explains the difference between her kind and the kelpies. Having never seen either a nerieid nor a kelpie Pteron is still not certain he understands the difference, but he does not have time to ask. His attention is caught by her mention of better control of the water and the subsequent demonstration pulls his entranced gaze upwards. He watches, delgihted, as the bubble encloses them, and then laughs as he splutters water from his face for the second time in as many minutes.
“I suppose I should be glad that you won’t drag me down to the bottom of the sea,” He tells the violet-eyed mare, referring to the fact that she is not a murderous kelpie. “But I’m not entirely sure that you couldn’t drown me up here on the surface either, if you put your mind to it.” Despite the topic, his smile remains, and there is amusement in his voice
“I’m Pteron, by the way.” A delayed introduction, but at least he remembered. “What can I call you?”
@[Aquaria]
Her quiet repose on the surface of the sea is in stark contrast to his paddling strokes keeping him afloat. The way his wings seem to bob on the water is sweet, though. He reminds her of an albatross, large and bouyant in those rare times when they leave the sky.
It's a relief when he laughs at her display, water running down the length of his nose and dripping from his forelock. "I wish you could come see it. The sea bed is a beautiful place, never the same twice." Her voice is a little wistful as she answers him, revisiting her daydreams about home. His lack of grace in the water seems to be catching up with him, though, and she realizes that perhaps drowning isn't so far fetched for someone so foreign to the water as he.
"Here..." She starts, grabbing at the water's pull again. They've drifted a ways away from the sand, and she has to work a bit harder now to convince the sea to help her. After a moment, it responds, and a scoop of saltwater moves beneath them.
"Now just relax and let the water move you!" She suggested as they began to slide faster toward the growing strip of beach. A large wave built beneath them, lifting the pair higher than the sand as it rumbled inward. The sea took the initiative from her once it got going, slipping out of her control.
Foamy white caps frothed as they crested like the sea horses of old, only to be spilt onto shore. She made the landing as smooth as possible, even after the sea had taken over direction of the wave. Cool water swirled around them, tried to pull them back out as it drained from the beach around where it had deposited them. As quickly as it had been, the wave vanished.
Aquaria had leapt like a dolphin at the last moment, landing on her feet as the wave receded from her feet. A quick shake shed her cloak of sea and scales, leaving the sea mare pale and golden on the beach. She breathed the salt sweet air with lungs instead of gills. Grinning with the thrill of the ride they'd just taken, she spun about to find her new friend.
"Hello Pteron, very nice to meet you. I'm Aquaria," she chimed. Hopefully he'd be more comfortable now that he didn't have to keep his mind on not drowning.
@[Pteron]
what is left when honor is lost?
She describes the sea, and Pteron listens with great interest. Everything about this stranger is new and wonderful and entirely impossible. She is from a world he can never visit and possesses magic abilities he cannot fathom. Even when she uses them a second time, ferrying them toward the shore on a massive wave, Pteron has difficulty tearing his eyes from her. Does she know, he wonders, how impossibly lovely she is? Would she be out here, cavorting with a creature as normal as Pteron if she did? He wants to ask if there are others like her, living here on the island. He wants to stay here too so he might never have to look away from her violet eyes.
Being slammed facefirst into the sand does eventually break his rapt attention.
He’d been letting the water move him just like Aquaria had told him too (he’d have probably taken a lungful of saltwater if she’d ask sweetly enough) and has missed their rapid arrival on the beach. The sea deposits him none too gently into the shallow water, where he trips and then flips, landing on his back with a great splash. His wings beat one in surprise, sending up a great spray of water. For a moment a rainbow appears in them, but Pteron is too busy dragging himself to his feet to even see it.
The white feathers of his wings are saturated and incredibly heavy, so the pegasus simply lets them drag in the sea. His mane covers his face, dripping stinging saltwater into his eyes until he flings it back inelegantly. There is no coming back from this, he knows, and embraces the situation as best he can.
“Someday I will impress you,” he promises the mare who has just introduced herself as Aquaria. “But I am beginning to think that today is not that day.”
As he blinks away the seawater from his eyes, he is able to take a better look at the mare in front of him. Already besotted only by the head and shoulders that were visible in the sea, he takes a long look at the petite creature on the shore ahead of him. She has traded her pearlescent scales for a pattern of cream and white dapples, and the fluttering gills have been replaced by a sleek and uninterrupted neck – save those two little seastars that cling beneath her ears.
“Aquaria,” he says, looking slightly more bedraggled than the average waterlogged pegasus. Her name is as wonderous as the rest of her, a perfect nod to her Nereid nature, and he repeats it nearly reverently. “Aquaria. You are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.”
@[Aquaria]
"Oh dear..."
The sail of her mane flares in surprise to see him sand coated and soaked a few feet away from her. Yes, it was definitely a good thing there'd left the water. The feathered fellow seemed to have only narrowly survived their exit.
At his assurance that one day he'll impress her, she smiles abashedly. "I'm sure that's true. Honestly, I'm already impressed. You haven't gone running for the hills, even though I've doused you twice already." She chuckled, sauntering closer until she could touch her nose to his sodden wing. He dripped into the already damp sand in a steady rhythm. Her violet eyes shut as she felt each drop. Drip drip drop. Flecks of moisture that grew into a trickle as it flowed off of him. Water wanted to be with water, and so it took very little encouragement to convince the liquid soaking Pteron to return to its home in the sea.
In brief moments, he is dry. Her smile is angelic as her softly curved face lifts to meet his gaze. They are as different as can be, and yet a bubbling feeling still grows in her chest at his words. It was pure flattery, something her mother had warned her against since she'd begun to be more mare than foal. Her father had cautioned that folk would say anything, if they thought it would get them what they wanted. She was beautiful, yes, but she had to be smart too.
Problem was, it felt really nice to be complimented.
"You're not so bad yourself," she returned lightly. With a thud in her heart, the gold tinged mare realized that now that she had finished drying him, she was standing much too close. She was curious though. Now that they were no longer in her element, how would the dynamic change? She cleared her throat softly, swallowing her nerves. "Do you live here? You look an awful lot like a girl I met yesterday, Vita. Is she a relation of yours?" It was a safer subject, maybe, somethingshe could ask without worry of tripping over her own words.
@[Pteron]
what is left when honor is lost?
The concern in her voice serves only to deepen his embarrassment, and his pale face blushes as she turns his tumble into the sand into a compliment. She has doused him, but the idea of running had never once crossed his mind. If anything, it only serves to further fascinate him – as does the way she pulls away the water from his skin and sends it back to the sea.
It is a strange sensation, a tickle almost, and Pteron skin and feathers shiver even as his olive gaze follows the seawater’s glittering trail back to its origin.
“More and more impressive,” he tells her, and that is before he’s even looked back up at her. Their proximity had ranked somewhere beneath his fascination with the water magic she was weilding, but he realizes it not long after she does, just as he glances up from the wave that has swallowed the last of the water from his wings. This close, the gleam of her fin mane is captivating; it still glistens with water she has not shed. Though Pteron has never seen a horse without a mane before and might have thought it would look odd, the marine crest along Aquaria’s mane is somehow perfect for her.
The source of her color change appears to have been a trade of scales for hair, and though Pteron had been especially curious about the texture of her scales – would they feel like a fish? A snake? - he finds that both looks are pleasing to the eye. She clears her throat, and Pteron realizes that he has, once again, been staring at her for an overlong time. He accepts her compliment with an easy grin, knowing that his looks are purely luck and good genetics; he is no impossibly beautiful creature.
“No, I don’t know anyone named Vita.” Pteron tells her after a moment, trying to recall the names of the relatives he knows. It is almost entirely siblings though – perhaps this Vita a might be a more distant relation. His family has been in Beqanna for over two hundred years, after all; he has ties to nearly everyone. “I live on the Mainland,” he tells her, gesturing toward the distant northeast.
“I’ve actually never been here before, and I didn’t even plan on it. But then I saw you floating out there in the water and thought a visit might be worth my time.” He smiles then, charming in spite of his awe of her, and adds a question of his own. “Where am I, exactly? Is this Ischia? All the islands look the same from the air.”
@[Aquaria]
There's a bubble of pride in her chest at his admiring looks, the way he seems so pleased with her skills. There was such a difference in being told you were special by your parents, than by a horse you'd only just met. Especially when that horse was as charming as this one.
Her bronzy freckled nose wrinkled in disappointment when he said he didn't know her new friend, but it made sense. Aside from similar coloring, there was no reason to think they'd be linked. Winged horses were clearly not strange sights here. It was interesting, though, to hear that he was a stranger to the island.
"To be perfectly honest, I'm something of a stranger here too. But my sister is the Dame here, and I think I might stay a while. Apparently, a young mare shouldn't spend all of her time alone at the bottom of the sea." She rolled her eyes slightly at the parental quote. "So here I am. Just in time to lure a likely stallion to his near drowning." The gold dappled girl laughed at her own joke, mane quivering like a palm frond. She liked this Pteron so far. He didn't seem to take himself too seriously.
Looking back at the islandscape, she nodded in confirmation. "Aye, Ischia. Where my parents lived, and my siblings and I were all born. It just might be home." Her liquid purple eyes blinked at him curiously. "Is it as pretty from the air as it is from the land?" She asked, wondering what it must be like to view the world from above. She had an idea, it must be something like looking down at the reefs while she swam above. But the land had its own topography, and she was sure it must be lovely.
@[Pteron]
what is left when honor is lost?
Pteron is sorry to disappoint her, but he makes a note to keep an eye out for this mysterious Vita who looks a lot like him. Perhaps she lives on these islands too, though the stallion is not sure how long he’ll linger and if he’d find her in that short time. He’d not really meant to stop at all, but as Aquaria begins to answer his question, he is reminded once more how glad he is that he had.
He’s not entirely sure what a Dame is, but the way she uses the word indicates its someone of importance – perhaps the leader of the island. So Aquaria is part of the ruling family, or at least the family of someone who matters here, and Pteron smiles. Pretty and important, and more than capable of luring him to his death in the sea. He smiles at her jest but does not contradict it, instead adding that he’d find that perfectly acceptable: “As long as it was just a near drowning,” as opposed to the real thing.
She confirms that this place is Ischia and that it is her ancestral home, and somehow that seems perfectly fitting. Where else would a family of Nereids call home but a tropical paradise like this one?
“It’s mostly green,” he tells her, “but all different shades of it, ringed in white sand and then the green water.” There had been a smattering of clearings, places where he knows it it likely that a tree has fallen or where a pond or lake breaks up the jungle. “I like this view better,” Pteron tells her, and though he does mean the view of Ischia from the land, he doesn’t take his green gaze from hers.
@[Aquaria]
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