we are slaves to the sirens of the salty sea
She is not a monster, but she is not normal either. She is not made of the earth and not shaped by its influence. She is of the ocean and the water. The cold and the stars. She is created from blood magic and saltwater and she is not afraid of the predator who watches her, who tracks her, with his yellow gaze.
So there is no more hesitation when she reaches out to him.
She finds him solid and yet not at all. It is curious to feel something that does not feel natural at all. It does not sate her hunger but instead stokes the flames of it. It nearly consumes her, this curiosity. This need to learn more about him and uncover everything underneath the surface. To know if he has always been like this—created of darkness more than flesh—and if he can feel her the way she can feel him.
Her breath displaces some of the shadows, she thinks, but she cannot explore more before he is leaving her. She feels the distance but not the rejection of it. Just the knowledge that she was done.
He had decided that she was.
“Not enough,” she answers. She should have been given more time to discover the edges of him. To learn the shape of him. To hunt down the things that he does not have, that she thinks that he might.
She lifts a leg, hesitantly, as though she might follow him and then, after a moment, places it back down. “What did you learn?” She turns the question back on him, wondering if he had learned something in the honeysuckle of her breath against the endless black of his coat, of the coolness of her scales.
“Why did you leave?”
