[private] no other sadness in the world would do, aleksandr

[Chryseis]

someone will love you but someone isn't me --

She finds that it is difficult to leave the river. She comes back to it again and again, like maybe this time it will have the answers she seeks. Sometimes she comes in the bright of day, but most often, it is by the cover of night. There is something about the quiet and the dark, like maybe it is the sun and the afternoon birdsong that frightens her memories away. Maybe, in the safety of shadow and moonlight, and nothing but the lull of water running over rock, her memories just might creep out.

Maybe if she stands here long enough, staring at the current beneath the silver ribbons of the moon, she will remember who she was.
Where she was born, who her parents were, and everyone else that she is so sure she has met.
Everything that made her something beyond just a name.

She finds it hard to believe that Ivar is the only thing in her life. Enchantingly handsome though he was, and though their children were strikingly beautiful, something about it all just didn't seem right. While she did feel a certain affection for him she knows she does not love him. She knows that tropical island was not her home, she knows that there is more to her than what she can remember.

There is a sigh that brushes past her dark lips, lifting her gaze from the river to look instead at the sliver of a moon that remains half-hidden by clouds. Tonight was not the night she would remember anything, and she accepts that. She turns a gold-blazed face instead to the forest that flanks this section of river, tilting her head curiously at what she thinks is a sound of something moving in the dark.

Her heart jumps, not in fear, but in that long-lost way of excitement as it used to when faced with danger.

-- C H R Y S E I S

@[aleksandr]

[aleksandr]

well, I'm a lion in the haze and the lamb in the lightning

He approaches as a panther but does not stay that way for long.

The shift is fluid, quick, and when he rises as himself, he is no less wild than he had been when he had been in his predator form. He has also been his truest self when remaining true to his feral form. When his mouth was stained red from the hunt, his belly full, his appetites sated. it had been years since Beqanna had stripped him clean of his gifts, and he had never forgiven her for it. Never quite lost his bitterness when he stopped to think about what it had been like to live with blunted teeth and dulled senses.

For that reason, he does not often think about it.

He chooses, instead, to turn his attention to the glory of living.

Untethered, untamed. It’s this way that he arrives near her, his dual-colored eyes flashing with some unspoken humor as he takes her in, illuminated just briefly by the moon. “Hello there,” his whiskey voice is low and warm, roughened just slightly on the edges. His mane lies heavy and matted on both sides of a thick, curved neck, his mouth curled just slightly into a smile, as if whispering a secret.

He pauses far enough away to seem respectable, although he is not, but close enough that it feels intimate. There is a pause as he unabashedly studies her face before slanting his gaze away to the river that roars next to them, the dull sound of it both thrilling and relaxing. “What brings you out tonight?”

oh, these spears and chains of flames around my neck are tightening

[Chryseis]

someone will love you but someone isn't me --

She sees the panther as he slips from the darkness, and out of habit, she calls upon her familiar, cold shield. The invisible frosted threads weave their way around her, though the stillness of her face gives nothing away of the caution she harbors. She is not afraid of him, but she is guarded. Her fascination for magic has not faded as she grew older, but she has learned that it could negatively affect her.

If she had been a little warier when she was younger, she would still have all of her memories, she thinks.
And still, somehow, she does not regret her time with Ivar. She does not regret learning what it meant to live with the kelpies, raise her own kelpie son, and see how he grew. She only regrets that it came at a price, that she lost so much of herself along the way.

He shifts, from panther to stallion, and it is with a quiet kind of delight that she smiles, and her shield lowers. “You’re a shifter,” she comments, with a sweetened rasp to her voice; she so rarely spoke anymore, unless it was to her youngest. More often than not, she was alone now, and maybe that is why she does not hesitate to step close to him – she was not used to being alone, not anymore.

Or perhaps it is the way his wild mane frames such a handsome face that draws her in, and why she cannot seem to turn her eyes from him. “I always wanted something more…exciting than a frost aura.” The words surprise her because she speaks them so easily. She doesn’t remember ever wishing to have something besides frost aura before, and yet she had said it with such confidence that it makes her wonder what memory that wish was locked away inside.

She can feel the anxiety begin to tighten inside of her chest, but she quickly ushers it away. Her memories - or lack of them, rather - could wait another day.

“The quiet,” she answers his question with a slow, secretive smile. “Although I don’t mind the company, either.”

-- C H R Y S E I S