05-22-2017, 08:07 PM
Alayaya had an excellent vantage point to watch the strange colt wander up from the distant depth of the lake, growing larger and larger through the distorted prism of the water’s surface until he appeared gigantically large. It wasn’t clear that she recognized what the shape was, as it approached. Her head tipped to one side as she watched, newly fascinated beyond whatever she had been drawn to in the first place. Her demeanor had changed almost instantly as the shadow had moved over the lake bed below. Perhaps subconsciously aware of an impending audience she regained some of the energy she had lost in her quick walk to the edge of the water. There was a trembling, almost fidgeting eagerness again that consumed her slight frame. She took a practical step back from the edge of the water once the figure started to disturb it enough to generate small waves. Fascinated blue eyes held the kelpie until he rose from the water; small and familiar-shaped. As he stepped toward the bank through the shallows she laughed, enjoying the reveal, musical notes escaping with the thrum of energy under her skin, glittering like the sunlight in the cool morning air between them. This may have been what called his attention, for he seemed to notice her then.
She studied his face. She recognized he was a little younger than herself, but already they were nearly the same size and eventually, he would be much larger. Everything Alayaya practised was a show, from the extravagant grace of her footsteps to the dancer’s perfectly beguiling expressions writ in her little face. And while none of it was truly false, and certainly not unbecoming, they hid more than one would suppose, in a creature so small and frail. As she met the colt it was no different; she stood casually, openness and unperturbed childhood confidence on obvious display, the previous moment’s stillness and disquiet banished into no one’s memory.
The silence after his question dragged on a little bit as she watched him. Finally, just after the moment got awkward she spoke too; “Hello,” she said, in a voice of shy adolescence, her gaze carrying coyly from the dripping colt to the young stallion now drawing closer from along the bank. She smiled; a fleeting, powerful expression, and moved toward Ivar in the swift, fluid way of unfiltered sunlight, her skin flashing gold under the rising sun overhead. She pressed her cheek gently to his in a more intimate hello than either of them were entitled, having never met before, and then spun away again, bubbling with unlikely energy, and threw the weight of her gaze on Amet’s larger, stronger figure where, for the first time, they gave away something of the understanding that lay beneath them; the reason that restrained euphoria. The cool wetness of the lake, passed from Ivar’s face to her own, ran along her cheek.
To a casual, distant observer it might seem that she had waited to answer Ivar until Amet was within easy earshot. As Amet spoke she levelled her wide, over-bright blue eyes into his with a little too much recognition, too much familiarity, to fit with the carefree impish figure she was enacting this morning. The sun gathered over her skin and reflected from it in warm waves, as though from hot sand, and slipped along the metallic sheen of her coat in a mirage of bright youth unchallenged by tragedy or oppression.
“Amet!” She said, the word rolling with an exotic flavour, her lips wrapping around the dry, brittle desert sound of his name. She did not dwell there, but threw the full of her exuberant gaze again to the dripping dark colt again. “This is Ivar! He’s a fish.” The unflinching confidence in her voice did not expect or encourage correction, nor did it appear to allow that the idea that this boy might be simultaneously a fish and a horse was in any way unusual. It certainly was unusual, but Alayaya was too young to have pre-conceived notions about breathing water or air. “I am not a fish,” She clarified, “I’m a girl.”
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