Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
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Three Goblin Art
Peter Solarz
izzy's playlists!
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Jules of Nature
we're not kids anymore.
Cosimo Galluzzi
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Kiana Khansmith
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Mike Driver
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@mindthewater
NIX. kelpie original character, inspired by norse & celtic mythology. lady in the water with a crystalline voice. dark & mature themes present. indie, selective, private. – summoned by marmelo.
☽ caard. promo. ☽ 30+. she/her. gmt +1 ☽ est. 06/2026
blogroll : @lostsovl
MINORS DNI.
The place is a bit more lively than usual for a weeknight. She partly attributes that to the drizzle rapidly picking up outside. Nothing like a bit of inclement evening weather to convince the crowds to take up shelter by the local taps. And the only downside is that she looks like she should be kept off the tap before she's even come in. If she didn't know the barkeep and the bouncer personally, she very likely would be.
Thankfully, she does. And they both know she's not here for a drink when she takes up her usual seat in a corner booth on the periphery of it all, her trench coat bejeweled with droplets from the rain outside caught in the low-light. She sits patiently, putting aside her trilby and dabbing lightly at her brow to wick away some of the moisture before it has a chance to ruin her makeup: deep blue, smokey eye shadow and dark red lips - her signature look.
It's just another evening for her.
Until it's not.
The waiter comes by with a drink - neither ordered nor her usual. Her expression falls somewhere between confusion and suspicion, her brow furrowing every so slightly, her eyes narrowing as she reaches towards the glass with more caution than a drink naturally warrants. Still, she studies it. The color, the contents, the extra olives. She does love olives... But who would know that? Then, at last, she takes a whiff - swirling the contents of the glass, she breathes in the variety of scents; savory, salty olives, dry vermouth, gin, vodka. A dirty martini, by all accounts ordinary as far as she can tell. But she never drinks anything she didn't make herself or witness.
Instead, she sets the glass down and tips her head back, letting her eyes flutter shut and she takes another deep breath. The world as she knows it fades away, the stark and contrasted shapes of drinks and people and scenes in the low-light shifting into a kaleidoscope of colorful outlines, each focused around its source before radiating and drifting out their scents like visible wisps of smoke and steam. Her brow wrinkles with the slightest concentration, honing in on a twin to her drink's. The same savory salt, the same dry vermouth, the same gin and vodka with extra garnish.
It doesn't take her long to find the source.
And keeping in line with her distinct lack of subtlety, she makes direct eye contact the first chance she gets.
Impressive. The detective's suspicion confirms her own, though the reaction is not entirely what Nix expected. The waiter isn't questioned. There is no frantic look-around, eyes first, as humans usually do, relying so heavily on what they see that they often forget the rest. Rather, it seems that the woman follows something infinitely more tenuous, and after only a brief moment of concentration she finds her bull's eye.
Nadine's lip imperceptibly twitches, the muscle memory of a smile. She doesn't blink nor flinch, lifting her own glass up to her lips, leaving a russet brown lipstick stain on the rim. Someone slides into the stool beside her, demanding her attention through an effusive string of compliments. She swivels back around, feigning interest in what he has to say -- she hasn't seen him before either, pushing fifties, chest hair bursting through the open collar of a dress shirt pulled taut over a round belly. She pretends to listen, as pretending comes easy to her now, and after thanking him for showing appreciation she effectively shushes him with a single finger. He could learn to show respect to the artist that had followed her act.
Somewhere behind her, the detective remains motionless. Nadine would have thought she'd make a move by now, but the seat to her left remains vacant. As though to prompt a reaction from her, she looks over her shoulder again to meet her eye, and lifts the skewer to pluck an olive into her mouth between pearly incisors.
She's not averse to waiting for the ripe moment.
the rpc is so starved of dom-leaning switch characters and then there's me and my collection of muses sitting here...... wasted
⋆｡°✩ the pirate ⋆｡°✩ the playwright ⋆｡°✩ the paragon ⋆｡°✩ the prince ⋆｡°✩
PICK YOUR POISON || SUPPLIED BY REN || MINORS DNI
nb: all follows/asks/etc. comes from @neverhangd templates courtesy of cavalierfou
James wakes with a start.
A great heaving breath pulled into his lungs, as though mirroring the one that first granted him life. Revivified he rolls onto his side, clutching at the moss between his fingertips as though it might anchor him to his own existence. Nature's cradle bearing him back into the world, born again.
He doesn't know how long he's been afloat, drifting somewhere deep in the recesses of his own clouded mind. What time is it? What day? No, the hours have not left him so quickly. He wears the same clothes, his skin yet shivers from the damp and he knows the sound of water crashing upon rocks beside him.
If it is so, then. Gathering his strength, he twists his head with a flurry of drenched copper clumps to lay his eyes upon the easel he had abandoned some time ago. Still standing, unmolested and unchanged from how he remembers leaving it. Drawing air through his nose in a sharp sniff, he blinks slowly to himself as he attempts to rise to his feet— slowly, and steadily.
His toes curl into the sodden grass beneath his feet, balm to the slight ache in his worn heels as he wanders back in the direction of his belongings; James glances skyward briefly, noting the position of the sun. Afternoon, half past three o'clock by his reckoning. Hours have passed since he brought his oils and brushes down to this pool, since...
With a stunned silence he stops before his canvas, noting the vague unfinished outline of the falls and the fixation of grim colour about a single, seated figure staring ominously out at him from her perch. His blood runs cold with exhilaration.
A dream? Or premonition. James remembers entering the pool, her shimmering irises, the pull of her tongue along sharp teeth. The endless dark. Ice in his veins and Death staring him in the face. He had entered the water, that much is for certain.
But casting his gaze about now, he sees no sign of the woman from this picture. Nor the creature he had so feverishly bound himself to.
~*~
Though this strange, otherworldly experience nips and tugs at the corner of his mind, James finds himself surprisingly content enough to continue his craft as previously planned; he spends his remaining daylight hours partaking in a picnic lunch he had brought down for himself, before returning to his canvas with renewed attention.
He does not quite finish the piece, however he meets with a point of satisfaction that allows him to at least pack up his things and make the uphill journey back to the vast plateau that bears the grand lake feeding these scenic, roaring falls. With the blush of the evening sun now descending beyond distant hills, James can feel the faculties of his mind sharpening with anticipation.
This day had brought him a most invigorating distraction in the form of tested faith, but now calls the siren of private passion. Again does he soon sit beneath that grand curtain of stars enveloping their world, pencil pressed to his lined book and bronze-cased telescope propped within its elevated tripod next to him.
The endless dark. But here the promise of starlight, the tender moon's protection. It will be another clear night, tonight.
It is with some surprise that, by the time Nix returns from the hunt, she finds James waiting.
Had he felt any different about their encounter by the time he woke up, he would have surely packed up and left, drank away the memory, and wished it all to be nothing but a dream. Yet, there he was, sat by a small fire, face towards the night sky, in search of his comet. He had no trace of haunting left in his countenance or demeanour, no sour anticipation for the disembodied cries that stole his sleep the first time.
The creature recalls the fierceness with which he'd seized its head, torn between succour and possession. He had clung to their brief connection with the feverishness of the insane, no longer a man but a feeling, a want. To want so much more than what you'll ever be given.
His downfall was transparent.
Nix arrives silently, with all the grace of a doe, knowing just where to step amongst the weeds and grass to mute her presence. She stops by his abandoned canvas first, the oils still fresh and acrid-smelling, and lifts the linen sheet to steal a glimpse. It was a... curious depiction of the waterfall and its siren, though she rather felt her beauty wasted on the void space he'd marked on the canvas instead of her face. Well, they couldn't all be Titian.
She lets the linen hang, and one of the brushes clatters to the ground.
"Hello, James." The naiad drifts away from the easel, cat escaping a crime scene, face turning to greet him from beneath a woollen hooded coat of rudimentary fashion, ashen grey. Underneath, she wore a different, ivory gown, modestly cinched at the waist and sewn in yellow-gold thread. It draped in loose, dry pleats over her bare feet, dragging as she serenely approached her subject.
"You look well rested. I trust you enjoyed your... nap, earlier."
The Shipwreck (1894) by Ivan Aivazovsky
[boop] from morgan >:)
& word prompts – accepting !
@mossyretro // Morgan
Always the same with this lot. They think Death can't reach them easily and therefore grow reckless in their indulgence, forgetting themselves as part of something bigger. There is still an order of things to be respected, a balance to be kept. These lesser predators litter the rivers and woods with their corpses, death and decay dragged like ornaments around their heels, existing without real consequence.
Too familiar with their antics, the kelpie sniffs her out long before she gets to the river, and prepares for confrontation. The night is still young, and the creature's black silhouette rises ominously from the waters, quiet but for its deep, abyssal breathing. Standing taller than any land horse, with rivulets dripping down its limbs and ribs, weeds tangled into the matted clumps of its mane, Nix holds the bank like an impenetrable fortress, waiting for the vampire to approach.
She travels alone. No partner, no lamb, not even traces of recent feeding. At the sight of the guardian, the woman's face lights up with incomprehensible delight, either entirely oblivious to threat, or determined to disregard it. In fact, she greets Nix much like children usually do: curious, giggly, their little hands so eager to get anywhere near its mouth, ignorant of the daggers lining its inside.
The woman's forefinger stretches out to softly tap the squishy middle of the creature's nose.
Nix glowers, shaking her head as though to swat off a fly, one of her hooves striking the earth with enough force to make the ground tremble.
<< Don't... do that again. >>
Did she think her come common mare?
<< State your business here. >>
Recovering from having been startled near out of his lean skin, the young man laughs— a rolling, rhythmic purr dredged from the pit of his stomach. All teeth, eyes closed, and a cat like smile left lingering in the wake of ruling given. It was, after all, a more than fair assessment of this smouldering monument to capital, industry and empire.
"You have your hunting grounds." James reasons by way of indication, sweeping a gloved hand up to gesture to her good person. Creature. He drops his hand again, regards her with a wily brand of satisfaction. "I have mine."
Where else could he have started to build his nest, truly? No other city on Earth was vast enough to bear the extent of his ambition, none so connected nor thrumming with unrealised opportunity. He had sampled all that Europe had to offer an enterprising man of his age: carved meat in Göttingen, fine wine in Florence, a spread of cheeses in Marseille. All delightful little distractions to tempt the palate with.
But none so eclectic as that which the city of London had to offer him. Career-led concerns aside, the beating heart of England had its charms— parks such as this, for example. Exquisitely planned to balance pleasure with convenience, punctuated with sculpture as well as bridges desirous of humbling the foreign eye.
To this portrait Nix makes an exotic addition, and he can feel at once the magnetic pull of others' eyes upon them. The scandal of his patterned fabrics, the debauchery of her gossamer gown. It is an electric and heady thrill James swells with, knowing the extent of their combined provocation in such staid and illustrious company. He is, for his own part, however more immediately concerned with the preoccupation she takes with the fine hair grown either side of his philtrum.
Did she like it?
He wrinkles his upper lip slightly, thinking back to the decision. He'd been rather inspired by a certain portrait depicting Lord Byron in Albanian dress; man of the world, destined for celebrity upon his long-awaited return. No harm in channeling a good omen for one's endeavours, not to mention he'd found it quite the point of charm in the exacting judgement of French women.
"No, though you might prefer to leisure." James shakes off the water droplets that had been flung upon his shoes with idle fuss, ruminating on the challenge he faced in appealing to his Reaper's capricious mood. When he is finished attempting to dry his footwear, he looks up just in time to catch the creature gazing upon a small group of children queued in good order for a treat of shaved ice.
She looks to him with... appeal.
"... The children will have parents, I wouldn't advise it." From behind the veneer of sea green lenses comes this deadpan response. In broad daylight, during a summer's afternoon? Impossible. He had pledged to help her sate her hunger but this was an ask well beyond both their means to achieve in some semblance of peace.
"Unless you mean the shaved ice, in which case you'll have to specify if you're expecting the child attached."
Yes, this was fertile ground for his schemes and appetites, they could agree on that. He seems to try and ask her something he doesn't verbalise, both of them stuck on a silly impasse where she keeps getting distracted by the red whiskers above his lip, her brow dipping into a frown, then looking away again. Very disconcerting.
"I hardly call having to track you down to this place leisure." Nix scoffs, throwing her head back to shake out her long river of hair, each droplet on her glamour shimmering in the golden daylight as she does so, appearing positively unreal. He would do well to make it up to her before her caustic mood got worse, or she would give other pedestrians even more of a reason to stare. Though she feels their eyes and hears their whispers in the breeze, the naiad remains wholly unconcerned.
"Oh." It takes her a second to understand why the children are brought up in conversation, as for once it hadn't even crossed her mind. No, this was too public a setting, and so far from her usual hunting grounds. "Not this time." Nix promptly clarifies, her tone bizarrely calm and casual. She leans back on her hands, fingers splayed on the soft grass, legs crossed lengthwise. When her focus returns to him, she looks like she's trying to figure out where in that intricate outfit he keeps his change.
"Have some ice with me?" Please. She very much prefers not having to be the one requesting service and handling transactions.
Safe return. He isn't sure he will ever return here because it is no longer safe. It is no longer his. All taken from him in a blaze of fire. Of blood and horror. He has only returned to see the ruin that is left of his happiness. She is still here, and soon he will not be. Soon he will be gone. Somewhere unknown, where he will be only a stranger. Someone as unimportant as weed among pretty flowers.
Her fingers close around his hand, and for a moment he almost has half the heart to ask her for mercy. For her to whisk him away to whatever peace she might have the power to grant him. But that would be too easy, now wouldn't it? To give up, just like that. He cannot do that. He cannot give up.
"I won't be able to return here, I fear. There is nothing left but rubble and pain. But I don't know where else to go"
She thinks of all the young souls that have told her they would go and find themselves at sea, and how many of those actually made it back to shore. If they ever did, they usually returned with some part of them missing, taken by the ocean god and his mistresses: half of their mind, sometimes a sense, or a limb.
Nix remains silent for a while, peacefully holding his hand and the despair that drives him to this conlusion. Her clarity comes with a weighty inhale, after which she nods sagely, acceptant. It made sense that he needed to get away from this place, never to look back.
"You may call on me if you need me. Your voice might get lost in the ocean, but I will hear it in the rain."
& wishlist.
some ideas that might help if we're plotting or you want to approach but don't know where to start.
last updated 8 july.
Little kiss starter for @mindthewater
The kiss is placed upon her hand from lips cracked and dry. A hint of a split in the skin from abuse, but this is beyond the point, for as his lips brushes against the hand, he cannot help but to feel a sense of safety. Perhaps it comes from the fact that they seem to find each other in moments of distress. That fate has chosen for them to look out for one another, even when their paths seem so different.
Even so the kiss is gentle. It is thankful and perhaps it is all he can think to do, as payment for her kindness. If payment is what she wants.
Grown into his skin, someone had tried to beat the softness from the boy she once knew. He brings no loose smiles with him anymore, and what were once effervescent hopes and dreams had calcified to keep bones from splinting.
Nix has no hand in fate. She can only watch.
The warmth of his kiss radiates across her knuckles, skin supple and sun-dried. During vernal days of rest and anticipation for the chapter about to open, she waits for him under the same willow by the shimmering lake, its branches dragged in the current, around which insects buzzed. He mostly talks, she mostly listens. Slender fingers close around his, squeezing to return the sentiment, hoping to soothe the ocean swelling within him.
"You owe me only your safe return."
why am i being recommended thorne’s blog…… that’s my idiot, i write him
It is to be the Devil's compact, then. This verdict unleashes in James a queer catharsis, as though at last answering a thousand questions orbiting the course of his life thus far. Of course there had been purpose. Of course there had been a dark hand in his making, molding, and manifestation. He was alive not because of any one soul's goodness or charity. He was alive because of what he had been willing to do, take, and seize.
The world responds in kind, offering him an end befitting of his story. Hunger will devour hunger, at the end of all things— here in the depths of these Hadean waters, waits a familiar embrace he will one day come home to.
For all the warnings of the Fathers to resist the seductions of temptation, it did not feel a sinful act to bequeath one's soul to another's keeping in this fashion. Perhaps strangely, the thought rather brings him comfort; as though it might prove a promise that one will not be entirely alone when the scythe falls, a fate he had otherwise readily proscribed himself in more melancholic, moonlit hours before this pledge.
"My soul is yours to reap." James murmurs with eyes shut, as though performing litany in Church. His word becomes sacrament, bound by will and rite.
He wonders if his mother had any such black beast to accompany her beyond the great veil? His father? Within the hollowing pit of his heart, James hopes someone had been there to hold the hand of his brother, before the end.
His thought for comfort builds in tandem with his curiosity. He wishes to see her, to drink in the furthest extremities of her grim existence. To permit his eyes to fall upon the sight of the creature that would one day bear him away from this place— away from suffering, service and solitude.
At once do his coal fire eyes pool with awe at the sight of his Reaper: a great and towering chimera of exposed bone and equine design, mane as thick as crude oil in motion while the cosmos itself lay trapped in its gem-like eyes. Gnashing teeth, strong enough to cleave ligament, fibre and flesh. His breath shakes with rapturous wonder, confronted with this avatar of the natural world's macabre he finds himself utterly consumed by the wish to reach out and embrace her muzzle, to cradle darkness incarnate within his palms and welcome that boundless corruption beneath his skin.
Oh, to cave and perish as a result of one's own forbidden desire. He would be willing, he thinks.
"Whatever might satisfy you, I shall offer it gladly."
He is a clever man, one who lives to surprise. If it is tribute in return for his years, he shall see her with plenty.
On the brink of being extinguished, a rebellious spark of new hope ignites within his breast. Fear ebbs for relief to take over, the thin, quivering high of someone who had just dodged death. In her waters, he is reborn.
The painter plucks easily from the branch, a choice which Nix does not influence. Whether he chose to die now or later made little difference to her, her preference light as the fleeting breeze that raked through the rocky landscape, here for a moment and gone the next. Some fell into her embrace, inviting oblivion. Others went out violently, clawing their way out, slashing their own throats to pour readily into her throat. It mattered not. The passage is always the same.
<< Understand that I am only scythe, not keeper. >>
Whatever judgement or trials awaited for him in the afters, were no longer the kelpie's domain. And though it would not devour the souls it reaped, it took pleasure in remembering each and every one that passed through its teeth, adding another embroidered loop to her comet's train.
<< To seal our agreement, you must give... a fragment... >>
Sensing the human's sudden desire to bridge the membrane between them, the creature's ears dart forward, alert, its large nostrils flaring and trembling with each rumbling exhale. Yes, this would do. This would do. She slowly lowers her head towards the cradle of his hands, mouth dipping into the water, and presses her forehead to his. His mind's turbulence begins to gently dissipate like fog over verdant hills, and a profound sense of peace spreads rapidly instead. The heavy, stifling frigidness of the water gives way to weightlessness, the dissolution of all earthly attachments and boundaries, sweeping the very last bit of resistance within him.
The next time he knows this much peace will be his last.
It's in this disassembled state that Lilith's fingers reach into his tapestry to pull a single thread, braiding it around her digit. He might feel it unravelling from the depths of his throat, as a cry of pleasure would, frame growing lax in the mist that now sustains him. Woman, monster, shadow, whatever was left of his perception would have struggled to determine just what performed this tiny, tender violation, of scraping something so precious to him to keep it as its own.
He would wake up in the banks, drenched, alive, with his head in Nix's lap, sun at high noon.
continued from ( x ) // @theprimordium
"Why are you in this pit, James." It's less of a question and more of a rather harsh judgement cast upon his choice of London as residence, and the communal latrine that had been a river once. Three years of keeping an eye on him through shaving mirrors and shop windows. He's a hard man to pin down, despite their agreement.
Truth was he had yet to deliver his first libation, school-first and all, and her patience was running thin.
Nix emerges amongst the swans, begrudgingly swimming ashore, her frown only partially dissolved by the theatrical way in which he spooks. Evergreen entertainment. She'd been watching the evolution of his aesthetic choices with mild fascination, always the peafowl in the chicken coop, but admittedly pauses at the sight of his moustache, and squints. Had he grown that thing himself?
The lake was at least decent, and she finds no weird city smells clinging to her as she hoists herself over the edge to sit, flinging her hair over her shoulder, fat droplets spraying over the polished leather of his shoes. She looks up, behind, considering his offer, debating whether or not to find offence in it. "You think I have to rely on you to eat?"
Truly, what was this helpless man to do, go fetch an orphan on a whim?
Her temper simmers beneath the dappled shade of a willow tree, immediately irritated by a collection of distant noises she cannot avoid. Gossiping park wanderers, playing infants, some horribly scratchy accordion about two streets away – then the nightmare of indecipherable urban rattle, however muted. She rakes her fingers meticulously through her hair, working out the knots, and continues to sulk.
Suddenly, she spots a brown cart under a red umbrella not far from them, where two or three unaccompanied children queued to collect raspberry shaved ice in wafer biscuit cones from a smiling man.
She looks up at James again, eyes wide as a doe's.
The statement was made without consent, as pure as a period, not a question mark. But surely what both of them desired should not be at the other’s expense. Grassland and sea need not clash on rocks that bucked off intruders from the secret realm. Every timid suggestion need not enrage her, and no amount of her own insolence he would feel sorry for.
What was the point of it? To love, to set free? A power better spent than laying each other as a lamb to be uncomplainingly knifed. Or penetrated. His hold on her is neither tight, nor shaming. It slides around to the curves of her palm, brushed by the cream lace of her garment puckered in tiny swags between them; floating shallow, irregular. Holding down the little storm brewing between thighs.
No words hissed in mouths like a stage villain, or he’ll shush her lips closed. Same two fingers to push again tumult past subsiding.
‘ We are God’s creations, inherently sinful... ‘ he trails off into silence. ‘ I feel like I needed to correct that. I’m always tempted. ‘
@mindthewater
It occurs to her that she's either been misunderstood, or he's insensitive to her suggestion that he was teetering on the edge of trespassing. Underlining whose insolence she'd warned against, Nix tugs her hand free of the man's steadying grasp. A flirtation was something, a plea for submission another.
Such permanence disquiets her.
Nix slips back in the ocean, eyes flashing as they roll, white teeth clicking, evidently finding the discourse to be a little tiresome by now. "I like you better when you're scared." She murmurs somewhere behind him, the faintest brush of marble lips put to his ear before she's sloshing around the low tide again, restless as an eel.
"God this, God that. Exhausting." Of course he's easily tempted, of course he's weak. He needs a book to show him how to be a man.
"Do you enjoy it then? Harnessing all that. Stifling the call of nature. Does it make you feel... saintly?"
@mindthewater said ❛can't you hear yourself?❜ | Nix
There is a stillness to him as whatever words might follow, simply dies upon his lips. Her voice is the cause of that. The way her question finds him is like an ice cold slap to the face. ' can't you hear yourself? '. Heavens, of course he can. Is it not logical for him to rest upon this conclusion? Does it not make sense, or-- has he truly lost whatever sanity left in him? It is not so much defeat as it is a wish for an end to come. To recognise that there is no point in moving forwards when the future is bleak and filled with nothing but suffering. Why bother?
He turns to her, long curls shifts with the motion and falls over his shoulders. The journey here has been perilous, but it has also been of his own making. His own greed and anger towards the world, and idly he wonders if it was even worth it in the end. The crutch steadies him like it has done for months now, the aching in his missing limb continues to remind him of his own stupidity. He is not six anymore, he is not the same curious boy who found amusement in pine cones and fairies. No, this version of him, the grown up version of him, sees only pain and fury. Seeks peace in finality. In death.
"Do not start you as well,"
It is not so much a plea as it is a request. What worth does a human life have? Especially his. But then, isn't it rather hypocritical of him to wish for the end when he has fought so very hard to stay alive? Yet, lately he has felt so very lost. Whatever voices that have whispered paths for him to thread are all dead and gone. The crew still holds him in somewhat high regard, but that life is one he would rather bury with the rest of his past. No, Silver is alone once more. But this time an invalid and even more useless than he has ever been.
"What else is there for me to do? I have lost, and frankly, I am tired of this life. Half the men out there are waiting to bury a blade in my back, the other half will come to that same conclusion with time. Am I to just wait until that day comes? Where else am I supposed to go when my own fucking body is failing me?"
Heat and bitterness coats his words. They are not directed at her but rather himself, and he speaks with a venom that spreads through him like a disease. One that only takes hold of his failing mentality rather than the physical part of him.
A sigh falls from him, and he finds himself leaning heavily against the hardwood desk. For a moment his eyes fall shut, as if he is attempting to regain some sense of rationality. He can't. All he sees is ruin, a bloody end that will come sooner rather than later.
"I am just so tired"
She is no stranger to this bizarre conundrum humans sometimes talked themselves into: fighting the same life they have killed themselves trying to keep. To the land, to a spirit, it is all remarkably simple:
Life wants to live.
It's blind and deaf to reason, circumstance, and future. The choices he had made, advice he'd followed; the accumulation of anguish at every turn, bitterness brewing like poison, corrosive bile, growing and growing and growing and destroying everything in sight.
Life wants to live, and water remembers everything.
The bright-eyed boy without an unkind bone in his body. A perfect, wet pine cone in his hand. Someone who did not look away.
Jonathan! His mother still shouts through the trees -- can't he hear her anymore?
Nix stands in the shadow of a lantern, ghostly still. The seawater footprints she had trailed all through the vessel up to his quarters had long since dried and they stand alone, the night outside dressed in stars.
"It is unlike you to surrender." The naiad calmly observes, her eyes following him as he paces, uneven steps pulling creaks and groans from the wooden floor. "I have not come to talk you back from the ledge, but I have come to challenge your resolve."
Because if he was so sure of it, why hadn't he summoned her? She would have taken him, his pain too, without hesitating, as an act of love. He'd shown her mercy more than once. Water remembers. It would be the least she could do.
"Rest, bright one. You have yet to mourn what you've lost."
Wistman's Wood located at Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England. Photo by Neil Burnell
