we are slaves to the sirens of the salty sea
Each breath is harsher than the last—and she feels it like it’s being pulled across her skin like sandpaper. It’s difficult to imagine that he is ill when he is hardly a thing at all. He is a thought more than anything else. A vision. Some strange creation of the night. How could something like that fall ill? It should be no more susceptible to ill health than the evening sky, than the belly of the ocean she crawled from.
She cannot comprehend it.
Has no other way to explain it.
So she tucks it away, her silvery eyes blinking slowly at his confession. Her smile is quiet, pulling in the corners of her mouth. “Does earthly beauty hold appeal for you?” She glances down at the water that still clings to the teal and silver scales, the mane that falls in silky ropes too far down her shoulders. She is aware of the flowers that bloom and hang around her face, of the delicate angle of her jaw.
“I did not imagine that such things would.”
A roll of her fragile shoulder. Who is she to claim what holds allure for him?
She is much more intrigued by the turn of the conversation—of the idea of his creation. “I would like to meet that someone,” she whispers. Curious as to who could have carved someone such as him. Was it someone like her father? Someone who bent the fabric of nature to their every whim or something else?
“You are not like me,” she agrees and feels an undeniable ache in her chest to take another step. To try and see him better—if she could see him at all. It felt like talking to a disembodied voice. To someone who was there and yet not at all. “I wish that I could see you better,” she admits, quieter this time.
