Evia has not yet met anyone outside of her parents—and even that interaction had been stilted. It had not been cold, necessarily, but it had not been steeped in love. Her mother had not pressed a thousand kisses to her forming jaw. Her father had not beamed at her with pride. She had been as much a product of their curiosity as anything, and it showed in the bewildered expression in her face. She doesn’t glow with warmth when the child rises from the water behind her. Doesn’t delight to see a kinship there.
Instead she blinks her strange silver eyes, the water having run from her elegant scaled neck.
Her nostrils flare, and she drinks in the riverbed. It is dirtier here than the land where she had been born—there it had been the clean, sterile scent of ice and then the clean saltwater of the ocean. Here, it is muddy and the water mixes with the loam to make something different entirely. It’s nearly distasteful and she decides that she prefers the saltwater to the fresh in that moment, the decision final in her mind.
Still, she doesn’t ignore the cry for long. Her angle angles toward the child, studying her, trying to categorize her and understand her with this inherited knowledge. “Hello,” she tries out the greeting, feeling the way it sounds on her tongue. “Are you talking to me?” Her language is nearly stilted, almost thick on her tongue with something exotic flavoring the edges of it, but it still sounds graceful. Her way of dancing around the syllables, slowly rolling them out and clinging to the edges of it, still lyrical.
She takes a step forward and her motion is fluid but less so than when she is the water. The mud clings to her, pulls her down, and she frowns down at it, disliking the way that it suctions to her.
“This is,” she hunts for the words, pausing to flip through the mind that is not herds, “distasteful.”
Her eyes flick up, peering out from beneath the flower and the silvery hair.
“Is it not?”
@[Aquaria]