11-29-2021, 09:14 PM
She has never fallen before, but it feels a lot like time in fast forward, like sinking miles beneath the waves in seconds instead of minutes. The weightlessness is something she is familiar with, but the upheaval of her insides fluttering on wings that try to burst out of her chest is something entirely new and entirely unpleasant, and for a moment she is dizzy with it, senseless. There is nothing to see but the dark, nothing to hear but the sound of her own racing heart and the air rushing past. There is no hint of ocean spray on her lips, no water to billow against those dark, delicate legs. For a long while she feels like what she imagines a star must feel, alone and bright and entirely solitary, suspended in a dark that reaches from one corner of the universe to the next. This universe of hers is much smaller, she is sure, but it makes no difference when you are the only thing that fills it.
At some point she realizes by the way there are no wings inside her chest that she isn’t falling anymore. There is a physical stillness that should make her feel steady again, but in the stillness she finds only a kind of precariousness that wraps itself like cold fingers around the pale of her neck. It makes her strain against the dark to see with eyes that are too wide and too bright and too blue for a place more black than night or space. A place even darker than when the sun hid from the day. But there is nothing here except a sense of foreboding, a winding beneath her skin that runs deeper than muscle, deeper than bone, deeper than the DNA she is built upon. It is an unraveling inside her that she can only see in her periphery, an awareness of the pieces of her that are being unmade and remade, the parts of her that are changing.
She can feel the magic of the mountain tugging at something intangible deep inside her, something that frays her at all the edges and leaves her wishing she hadn’t come. Something in her is being changed, rewritten, parts she would have never willingly given up. She feels foolish for thinking that she might come here and take from the mountain and expect it not to take something in return.
She feels hurt, furious, that her father isn’t here too.
That he is not the kind of man to jump in beside her.
That he is not man at all, not mortal or earthly.
He is more than that, and none of what he is belongs to her.
***
Hers is a world that builds itself around this kernel of pain she hides inside her chest, like a kind of scar tissue meant to wall off this tiny seed so capable of growing into her unbecoming. It grows as if to protect her from the truths that live beyond, from realities with edges as sharp as any steel blade. She will be safe for as long as it holds her within, safe until the effort of containing her draws cracks and fissures wide enough for her to see out of, to catch glimpses and memories and moments of the things she left behind. It will be wonderful, this walling off of a cancer inside her chest, wonderful until the magic runs out and abandons her as everyone but her mother (except in death) has done before.
She will be safe until she isn’t, but this new world is so gentle when it reaches up to take her that she does not remember to be afraid.
She does not remember anything.
When she opens her eyes again it is because, even beneath the waves, the light of morning paints the lid of each eye a gold too warm to ignore. She is home with her family - a mate and their children, not many, but enough for her heart to feel full - and it doesn’t feel like a strangeness to be curled at the side of someone who greets her with lips pressed to her neck. She realizes she has a hundred memories just like this one, of pale glass green eyes set in a delicate face full of mischief and affection, of smiles and laughter and the curve of lips she finds quite beautiful. There are entire years worth of these memories, an entire collection that she rifles through now because, for some reason she cannot name, something grips her heart in a way that makes her afraid she’ll forget all this.
But there is no reason to fear that. There is no pain in her life but that which makes these good moments brighter. Fuller. She thinks more broadly of her family - not her siblings because all of them are irrelevant, none of them are like Alleria, creatures who wake beneath the sea, whose face and voice is enough to make even the wind bend to her whimsy. She thinks instead of her mother, perfect and beautiful and ever present, and there is no blight of a death to darken the memory. She thinks of her father, decidedly, perhaps with some bias, who is less perfect and less present but still admires who his daughter has become and her prowess in this world beneath the sky, beneath the sea. This place where light fractures like broken glass and the pieces spin through currents that tangle at the silk strands of a pale white mane as if even they cannot resist the pull of her.
She is siren, not selkie, not bound to a skin that she must physically leave behind, and this is right too. This Alleria cannot fathom a world where what she is is something wholly apart from who she is. Beneath the waves she has fins and gills and shells in her hair, and when she climbs to that odd world above to see her mother and her father, those pieces melt away and hide inside of her so that she is the flawless mimicry of both of them. Not God, not Archangel, but still perfect.
She does not keep track of the number of days that pass after this one, nor does she keep track of the way her family expands, the way time finally starts to age her skin and her face and trace faint wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes from too much time spent laughing with her mate, Lore. She only knows that this life has been good to her, that time was kind instead of cruel, that their children and their grandchildren thrive in this place beneath the sea. She knows that she is happy, that anything less than this would not have been enough. It is why she does not worry or regret when death comes to find her in old age, why there is peace inside her chest when she closes her eyes and sighs out the last of her life with Lore still pressed to her side. Always there, and perhaps the most perfect part of both of them - Alleria can admit this to herself with a smile now - now that she is part of the ephemera.
Except when she opens her eyes again, it is to the discovery that the place she left behind was the only heaven she should have expected. This place, this mountain, these faces around her all equally dazed, they draw everything back to her in crystal clarity until this insurmountable loss feels just like a very distant memory of falling.
She is like a star.
Alone and entirely solitary, suspended forever in the dark that lives inside her chest.
At some point she realizes by the way there are no wings inside her chest that she isn’t falling anymore. There is a physical stillness that should make her feel steady again, but in the stillness she finds only a kind of precariousness that wraps itself like cold fingers around the pale of her neck. It makes her strain against the dark to see with eyes that are too wide and too bright and too blue for a place more black than night or space. A place even darker than when the sun hid from the day. But there is nothing here except a sense of foreboding, a winding beneath her skin that runs deeper than muscle, deeper than bone, deeper than the DNA she is built upon. It is an unraveling inside her that she can only see in her periphery, an awareness of the pieces of her that are being unmade and remade, the parts of her that are changing.
She can feel the magic of the mountain tugging at something intangible deep inside her, something that frays her at all the edges and leaves her wishing she hadn’t come. Something in her is being changed, rewritten, parts she would have never willingly given up. She feels foolish for thinking that she might come here and take from the mountain and expect it not to take something in return.
She feels hurt, furious, that her father isn’t here too.
That he is not the kind of man to jump in beside her.
That he is not man at all, not mortal or earthly.
He is more than that, and none of what he is belongs to her.
***
Hers is a world that builds itself around this kernel of pain she hides inside her chest, like a kind of scar tissue meant to wall off this tiny seed so capable of growing into her unbecoming. It grows as if to protect her from the truths that live beyond, from realities with edges as sharp as any steel blade. She will be safe for as long as it holds her within, safe until the effort of containing her draws cracks and fissures wide enough for her to see out of, to catch glimpses and memories and moments of the things she left behind. It will be wonderful, this walling off of a cancer inside her chest, wonderful until the magic runs out and abandons her as everyone but her mother (except in death) has done before.
She will be safe until she isn’t, but this new world is so gentle when it reaches up to take her that she does not remember to be afraid.
She does not remember anything.
When she opens her eyes again it is because, even beneath the waves, the light of morning paints the lid of each eye a gold too warm to ignore. She is home with her family - a mate and their children, not many, but enough for her heart to feel full - and it doesn’t feel like a strangeness to be curled at the side of someone who greets her with lips pressed to her neck. She realizes she has a hundred memories just like this one, of pale glass green eyes set in a delicate face full of mischief and affection, of smiles and laughter and the curve of lips she finds quite beautiful. There are entire years worth of these memories, an entire collection that she rifles through now because, for some reason she cannot name, something grips her heart in a way that makes her afraid she’ll forget all this.
But there is no reason to fear that. There is no pain in her life but that which makes these good moments brighter. Fuller. She thinks more broadly of her family - not her siblings because all of them are irrelevant, none of them are like Alleria, creatures who wake beneath the sea, whose face and voice is enough to make even the wind bend to her whimsy. She thinks instead of her mother, perfect and beautiful and ever present, and there is no blight of a death to darken the memory. She thinks of her father, decidedly, perhaps with some bias, who is less perfect and less present but still admires who his daughter has become and her prowess in this world beneath the sky, beneath the sea. This place where light fractures like broken glass and the pieces spin through currents that tangle at the silk strands of a pale white mane as if even they cannot resist the pull of her.
She is siren, not selkie, not bound to a skin that she must physically leave behind, and this is right too. This Alleria cannot fathom a world where what she is is something wholly apart from who she is. Beneath the waves she has fins and gills and shells in her hair, and when she climbs to that odd world above to see her mother and her father, those pieces melt away and hide inside of her so that she is the flawless mimicry of both of them. Not God, not Archangel, but still perfect.
She does not keep track of the number of days that pass after this one, nor does she keep track of the way her family expands, the way time finally starts to age her skin and her face and trace faint wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes from too much time spent laughing with her mate, Lore. She only knows that this life has been good to her, that time was kind instead of cruel, that their children and their grandchildren thrive in this place beneath the sea. She knows that she is happy, that anything less than this would not have been enough. It is why she does not worry or regret when death comes to find her in old age, why there is peace inside her chest when she closes her eyes and sighs out the last of her life with Lore still pressed to her side. Always there, and perhaps the most perfect part of both of them - Alleria can admit this to herself with a smile now - now that she is part of the ephemera.
Except when she opens her eyes again, it is to the discovery that the place she left behind was the only heaven she should have expected. This place, this mountain, these faces around her all equally dazed, they draw everything back to her in crystal clarity until this insurmountable loss feels just like a very distant memory of falling.
She is like a star.
Alone and entirely solitary, suspended forever in the dark that lives inside her chest.
alleria
pull me back to shore, i'll never reach my place
please scramble her selkie shapeshifting and her carried infrared vision!
claiming seashells (like the flower trait) for a 0 space trait
thank you cassi!