"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
On some level, probably long before she could recall, there’d been some type of fracture, some type of trauma that had never quite sealed itself. A part of her had begun to believe that it was just her imagination or her needless worry that was stifling and snuffing the life out of her. She’d harbored hope, that somehow, someway it would be mendable - whether it be through leadership, love, or family the gap could be fixed. And it did, but never quite to capacity and it was enough to leave her unsettled and remorseful. That miniscule emptiness she had still felt was like a thorn in her side; unreachable even with the greatest flexibility. So she had turned in any direction other than north and left Nerine and all of Beqanna behind her.
It felt cliche and unpoetic, but she could only hope that one day her family would understand why she had done it.
Yesterday, Breckin finally began to realize how long she had been gone and just how stupid and selfish her journey had become. Leilan had come with her for a time, be even he had grown tired of the separation between them and their friends and children and had returned to them before she was ready. He’d been patient - he always was with her - and allowed her to fumble around aimlessly, looking for answers that never to reveal themselves or simply didn’t exist at all. Now she’s sure that he realized this a long time ago, and was why he had kindly departed and let her be with her incessant wandering and searching.
Today she is still unsettled, and still unable to shake the feeling of something missing or forgotten. But now, if she was going to stay unsettled and broken, then she would be unsettled and broken with her family and friends and the only home she’d ever really known.
With the serpentine river rolling past her left shoulder, her dark eyes searched lazily for a good crossing point. The wind jarred her mane, provoking the shells and sea glass tucked neatly there to sing softly in her ear. The blue feather there too twirled as if dancing in response to the steady pace of her footfalls and the music of her trinkets. She is somewhat underweight now with the sweaty, dust stained coat of a vagabond, but below the grime the same collection of black dots are posted against her white.
For a moment she wonders how many spots she has, or how many times others that she had known might’ve wanted to count them. The thought makes her smile wistfully; half a smile for humor and half a smile for getting lost in favored memories. But altogether, it was the smile of a girl wondering if she would ever know the answer.
The kelpie’s movements drifts slowly a few feet beneath the surface of the water, the opalescent white scales of his stomach stretched taut over his last meal. Though he has felt the shift from warm sea to cool river, Ivar has not made an effort to guide his drifting. So long as he remains in the water he is home, and his golden eyes drift shut as he dozes beneath the warm autumn sun.
When he wakes, it is to the scrape of stone against his back. The kelpie has drifted into the shallows of the riverbed as he slept, and he rolls to right himself without full waking. He breaches the surface to do so, sapphire head and shoulders rising above the water. The water here is far cooler, a reminder of the seasonal shift on Beqanna’s mainland, and Ivar begins to pull himself back to deeper water with grasping motions of his clawed limbs, eager to return entirely to the water.
Something moves in the corner of his vision and the kelpie stills.
Ivar turns his head toward it, the long sapphire and white dreadlocks of his mane dripping into the slow-moving water of the shallows.
“Breckin,” he says, her name as quick to his lips as the recognition of that familiar pattern of black on white. His voice is rough, forever a contradiction to the rest of him, but there is amusement in his metallic eyes as he takes her in. Amusement and curiosity, for it has been years since their last encounter and she certainly looks the worse for the time passed. Amusement and curiosity and hunger, because despite the satiety from his last meal there is always a need for more.
“Could I interest you in a swim?” The question is spoken casually, as though it is in good faith and he truly means only what he says. They both know that is not the case, but the kelpie has never been able to resist a challenge. Breckin looks – physically at least – like far easier prey than ever before. The sharp line of her hip bone stands out, and the sleek muscle he recalls has grown thin beneath her dusty coat. Easy prey, he thinks again, and smiles his perfect smile that she has always so firmly resisted.
So lost in wandering thought, she doesn’t notice the disturbance in the river’s path, or the familiar face that rises above the plane of moving water. At least not at first, not until that dreadful voice suffocates the lovely jingling in her ears. Initially, she ignores it, or simply refuses to acknowledge it out of stubbornness, and perhaps even tries to convince herself it was only a figment of deeply repressed memories. But that unsettling pang by the name of truth causes her stomach to twinge and she winces in response. The leopard mare stops, torn between humoring him or continuing to deny his existence and be on her less-than-merry way.
He was probably watching her now, she thought, and probably with that same stupidly smug smile he usually wore. Of all the times to run across this one again, why now? Why when even though she still came up purposeless, but had at least finally settled on a direction? If she walked he may not pursue her, but then again, he might one day reappear on the grey shores of Nerine again as he had done once before when she had been Queen. Against her better judgment - always against her better judgment - she slowly pivoted to find his strangely beautiful eyes. The girl would probably come to regret it, but she settled on indulging him now.
“Seamonster,” she drawls slowly with a lazy smile, remembering the first time they had met and the seemingly unsuspecting title he had dubbed himself with. “What a coincidence to run into you so far from the sea.”
Moving a few paces closer, she consciously makes a point to stand a few paces away from the bed of the river, yet close enough to not come off as entirely rude. Up close now, she sees the contrast of deep blue and gold that acts as a dam against the white. Cold eyes linger on the lines of gold for longer than the rest, instantly warming as the color revives the sense of home and security she’d only recently rediscovered. It was a color that would always resonate with some type of meaning to her.
His question catches her falling smile, twisting it back into place with a charming curve. Unlikely that he had bothered to stop her for the sake of humor, but who knows. “In need of a good laugh, are we?”
Difficult prey has always been his favorite, and the wince he catches with his predatory eyes bring a delightful rush of adrenaline. Difficult but familiar, a combination that he knows grows more satisfying with each encounter. He likes to watch the fear in their eyes as it battles with confusion, as they struggle to understand why this is happening and then realizing that it is happening again. Breckin has only the slightest notion of what he is, though the slow way she calls him Seamonster run a thrill down his spine. If only she knew.
Breckin thinks she is safe at the shoreline.
They always do.
But the shoreline is where his kind and hers have always met, where the aquatic kelpie find and capture their terrestrial prey. These are his hunting grounds, this place in the shallows and the shoreline; this is where he is his best. Yet she smiles, and her wry words are proof she doesn’t yet understand the danger she is in. They never do, and Ivar has always liked teaching them.
The kelpie stands, shedding both water and his finned tail as he does. Breckin had once called him ’annoyingly attractive’ as he basked on the sand, and he has not changed. Each bit of him has evolved to capture the eye of a mare, from high crest of his neck to the strong line of his back. He knows this, just as he knows it bothers her, and the idea of flustering the strong willed mare is nearly as delicious as the way he imagines she might taste.
He’d almost had her once before, in the waters of Ischia, but she’d slipped away and the kelpie let her. He’d had enough distractions then to let one by, but time has passed since then – life has changed them both. Her more than him, perhaps, but the wide-eyed women of his little island are far away from the river’s edge, and Ivar feels the distant rumble of hunger beginning to rise.
The kelpie takes a step forward with his neck outstretched, just enough to reach her, jut enough to brush his muzzle against hers.
“Come swim with me,” he tells her, and this time the words are a command rather than a request. They’re the same command as he’d pressed into her when he’d touched her. It would have been easier to stay near, to use his hypnosis to lure her into the water. He knows this, and yet he withdraws. The Breckin he recalls had always been strong-willed, and he’s curious how much she’ll fight today.
Of course she’d always been drawn to him, on some vague, primordial level. When the mind clashes with the body, it’s terribly confusing. Logic tells her to flee, but something else draws her nearer, pulls her closer. It’s always been a battle of persistence versus will. But at such a fractured state, it’s like his gaze found the faultline, his words the pry bar and his touch the leverage to pry it all apart.
And the more that crevice separated, the less her will remained substantial.
When he touches her, it’s chaos. The connection between present and past becomes nonexistent and the press of so many entangled emotions becomes overwhelming. So much so, that she can’t make heads or tails of anything or who they had come from. Though plain as the daylight cast down over her spotted back, there was fear at the root of it all. For as much as she suspected there to be something unsettling about the fellow that looked at her so hungrily now, the woman had never expected something so resounding. And it rattled her in every sense, nearly making it impossible for her to remain intact with her own free will.
Focus! Something, something, focus on something. Anything! she pled to herself. The gold. At last her chocolate eyes find the golden lines of his patches and she clings to it so dearly it nearly knocks the breath out of her. Gold is home, gold would always be home.
“You must be the most beautiful liar I have ever known,” she quips, trying to distance herself verbally and literally by taking a step away from him. The statement is directed at his unconvincing promise to not laugh at her ‘much’. It’s not intended as a compliment, but a plaintive truth.
Despite her own rising fear, or if it’s the residual of those that once stood in her place, she smiles. It’s feeble, but still it’s there and a small victory that she can claim when there was hardly any to come by. “As much as I’d really love that, I just don’t have the time today, I need to get back home. Maybe another time?”
Though as much as her efforts may be seen as valiant, Breckin is all too frustratingly aware that each ill placed step has done nothing more than move her closer and closer to the water’s reach.
08-29-2019, 09:23 PM (This post was last modified: 08-29-2019, 09:24 PM by Ivar.)
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
The scent of fear billows swiftly and without warning. Ivar’s golden eyes dilate unconsciously and his pale nostrils flare as the kelpie leans in. The taste is intoxicating, and the sharp edges of his teeth catch at the tangled strands of her bicolor mane as he pulls her roughly closer. She is bony against his broad chest, slimmer than he remembers, and that surprised him. He is not sure why, but that millisecond of hesitation is all she needs, and he finds his teeth closing on only air as the leopard woman pulls away. Ivar does not hide the sharp snort of irritation as she does, nor the frustrated click of his teeth against each other in his overlong jaw.
Her compliment is met with a narrowed and carefully unamused glare. The expression darkens as Breckin attempts to excuse herself, as she tries to tell him she does not have time to swim. When she asks “Maybe another time?”, Ivar answers with a clipped: “No. Now.”
A gentleman would’ve accepted her excuses as a refusal; would have done so on the other occasions that the spotted mare has deferred his attention. But Ivar is not a gentleman. He is the seamonster that he had named himself upon their first meeting, a kelpie who preys on the weakness of women and the frailty of their warm bodies. He is a predator, one who holds the rapidly pulsing throat of the appaloosa mare between his teeth, who presses his cold tongue to the heat of her jugular and imagines what it will taste like slipping down his gullet. Ivar growls, forces her neck back without thought of her comfort as he closes the space between them and presses his scaled shoulder against hers.
And then he pulls away with an impossibly beatific smile, stepping backwards until his hooves hit the river – and then moving farther still.
Breckin follows him.
If her eyes look a little glassy, it might just be a trick of the light. If her movements are a bit stiff, it could be the unevenness of the ground at riversedge. It might also be the effect of hyponosis, of a wordless command pressed into so much of her skin that the spotted mare could no longer resist. The kelpie’s appearance is the lure; his touch is the hook. It is the hook that Breckin has been able to dance about every time before then, darting away and back to Nerine, back to her crown, back to her husband. This time, Ivar had chosen to simply drive it into her heart.
They arrive in Ischia sometime during the night. Breckin is coughing and Ivar is saying something about krakens when they surface. It certainly looks like they’ve been attacked by krakens. Or rather, that Brecken has. Ivar’s scaled skin is entirely unmarked. Such arrivals are not infrequent though, and the scent of fresh blood coming from the northeastern islet of Ischia is nothing of note. The kelpie is attentive, brushing his muzzle across the scrapes along her neck and withers, his scaled nose turning pink in the moonlight. Each touch is laced with soothing commands, and when he pulls away from the dazed looking mare, it is with an expression of utter satisfaction.
You’re happy here. You like it. Ivar will keep you safe. Nothing else is important. You’re happy here. You’re happy and you're safe and you never want to leave. Your child with the kelpie will be safe here. You're safe here. You'll never want to leave.
and i'll use you as a warning sign that if you talk enough sense then you'll lose your mind
