Like a flower waiting to bloom - Ivar

[Ivar]

I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take While Kylin watches the turtles, Ivar watches Kylin. She is exactly as excited as he had hoped she would be. Last night he had watched the other nest break open, had seen the tiny creatures race to the sea. He’d followed a few of them until they drifted away in the current. Most had found floating seaweed to hide in, and Ivar did not blame them. Though their mother had been a massive creature, the hatchlings wouldn’t even make a mouthful for the predators of the open ocean. They must grow up farther out to sea, he reasons, past the eastern horizon of Ischia even. He’s never seen an adolescent sea turtle, after all. Kylin asks if they are from one mother and he nods. “Yes,” adds the stallion aloud, knowing that with her attention on the nest she might have missed his nod. “She dug out a nest and laid them all in, covered them up, and went back out to sea.” It’s such a different existence than his own; he cannot imagine a childhood without his mother. Of course, he is not a turtle, and perhaps they do not feel emotions the way that he does. Maybe they don’t even know that they have a mother. Ivar remains still as she brushes against him, but he lowers his head to match hers, his nose scant inches above the sand. A single bold (or perhaps stupid) hatchling scrambles toward them. Perhaps the moonglow reflecting off Ivar’s scales have confused the little thing – it only knows how to run to the moonlit sea, after all. Whatever has made it come closer, Ivar is as hesitant to crush it as Kylin is. Even when it brushes against his scaled leg he does not move, and he bends his neck down and watches it disappear into the sea beneath him. “Maybe?” He replies, honestly unsure of the answer. The hatchlings on the beach have all made it to the water, so he does not have to watch his step so closely as he picks his way across the sand to the nest. It is full of sand and strange leathery shells. “I think they all…” he starts to say, but stops when there is a bit of motion. One last turtle crawls out from beneath the eggshells of its siblings. “Watch out!” He says to Kylin with a playfully false tone of alarm in his tenor voice. “I think this one’s coming for you!” kelpie mimicry | dragon scales | tactile hypnosis