The behemoth loomed high above them, silent and still. The spotlights in the hall shone a soft, dim blue. The faint brightness cast an unearthly glow over the smooth concrete walls and vaulted dome of the ceiling.
“I mean, he said they got it out of the ice. That’s ‘how.’”
Their voices slipped back and forth beneath the sapphire light, the weak motes of dust slowly drifting, and the weary old bones suspended by concrete and wire.
“Yeah, but... How? The logistics alone to locate and excavate that sort of thing, much less bring it back here-”
One could be easily forgiven for assuming the two of them had slipped far beneath a realm of water in that moment, deep within the abyss of an ancient, untamed world.
“Is it... Even real?” Eulalie slowly lifted one of her hands towards the massive creature, though she could not ever hope to reach far enough. “It could be, um, like something theoretical..?”
“No. Look closer.” Amiela could only say so much of what she meant aloud. “Listen.”
If there was even the smallest chance of someone eavesdropping on them there, Amiela knew she could not verbally instruct Eulalie to focus her senses in an entirely different manner. She could not tell her to sweep forth and grasp for the barest hints of existence still remaining inside the sinuous skeleton, to touch those long-dry pathways where vital fluid once coursed throughout the spiraling body.
Amiela could only meet Eulalie’s gaze and gesture ever so slightly towards her ears instead of her awestruck eyes.
At least Eulalie got the hint right away. That girl never was very receptive to telepathy, Amiela mused. It was lucky her natural intuition could easily bridge the difference.
Eulalie closed her eyes and inhaled. Amiela began to feel the gentle humming stir of power as it moved through the space between them, swirling away from the aural presence of her friend. The magic of a fellow witch often felt like vibrations of inaudible noise prickling at her skin, or sometimes even solid waves of radiating heat that would tremble and move forth with purpose through the air, almost enough to become truly tactile.
Amiela mimicked the silent incantation. Her own eyes did not even need to slip shut to focus, not like Eulalie. Amiela’s mental perception lurched faster to catch up, pushing her field of view towards the fossilized beast with a thrumming swirl of extrasensory energy.
They inspected the ancient corpse together, rising like a pair of birds to flutter over the heights of each segmented spinal column, tapping, touching, gliding and weaving, yet never truly altering. The pair of them examined the beast from the pointed tip of those waiting jaws, all the way down the twisting curves of that massive coiled spine, until they found that the sinewy, jagged tail tapered off without any flair or adornment.
Amiela swore she felt a trickling sensation grip down her own spine in turn. An illusory feeling, she knew, as sensory magic could most closely be described as a type of ‘sound,’ rather than true touch, ethereal echolocation of the inner ear and mind. Amiela was well aware that a skilled-enough witch could utilize the most subtle pushing pulse of energy against an object, living or dead, to prod down past the outer surface to reveal much more about what it looked like inside, listening to the silent songs of where it had been, what could have ever once brushed against it, or even the latent chemical properties the material itself was composed of.
“It has no limbs.” Eulalie hummed in quiet concentration. Her voice had grown even more soft, but her tone itself evened out to become much calmer, far more analytical. “The structure doesn’t even suggest it might’ve had any, not ever... Not even vestigial, like whales with those, um, weird inner floating pelvis bone things.” The softly brushed lids of Eulalie’s eyes drifted back ever so slightly to peer at the room around her. She still could not open her eyes in full and use her extrasensory powers at the same time. “And no teeth? It’s like a fangless snake.”
“No. Even snakes have bones.” Amiela stood in a daze just witnessing it. Her mind raced to envision how such a creature could have ever possibly looked when it was alive. Even in the depths of her wildest imaginings, Amiela found she simply could not conjure the faintest of pleasant ideas. “‘Bones,’ but not made of bone. It’s more like... A lamprey, but with no teeth.”
“Oh, that is creepy.” Eulalie shuddered with a quietly giggling exhale. “An eel as big as a city street..? Gods. I’m glad it’s a fossil! Better for it to be extinct.”
“Yeah.” Amiela refocused her attention on the looming set of jaws. “The material’s cartilage, but look at how the mouth is pointed.” She pointed higher. “So it was probably predatory. Sort of like a snapping turtle? But with sharp, stiff cartilage, like a shark?” Amiela shook her head. Senses still primed, tapping over those ancient mineral pathways, she found she could not stop herself from lingering a faint caress along the sleek outline of that enormous, convex skull. “An ambush hunter? At that size? It’s... Hard to fathom.”
Eulalie’s fingertips twitched at her sides. “Gods.”
Amiela slowly let her magic recede. She shivered and stepped forward instead, listening to the soft click of her boots against the bare stone floor. “What could the world have even been like, back in those days? With something like this around.”
“Probably some nightmarish hellscape.” Eulalie grimaced when she finally opened her eyes fully. “I’d never go swimming again, not with something like this lurking in the sea, I can tell you that much! Not ever.” She hugged herself tight. Eulalie let her residual magic fade and return to herself as well. She started to pace around the area in tight little circles. “This is a really cool exhibit and everything, but gods, can you even imagine it?!”
“I don’t know. It’s not like being on land would be any safer, with all the dinosaurs.” Amiela tilted her head to watch the strange, mercurial inner light play over the contours of the ancient fossil. “It would be strange, I guess, seeing living things that big.” Amiela shrugged. She could not tell Eulalie aloud that it would probably mark the end for mankind before it even truly began, had their species existed in more of an overlap, perhaps minus a few of those gifted with the potency of witchcraft.
Even then, Amiela was not quite sure how she herself would ever fare against an agitated therapod the size of a city bus rushing hot on her heels. Magically inclined heels or otherwise. She grimaced a bit as she stared deeper at the swirling set of razor-keen horns crowning the brow of the beast mounted high over concrete and steel.
“But...” Amiela forced her limbs not to twitch any more at the sight of it. “Well. I guess I don’t regret shelling out for those tickets after all.” A wary little smile crept over Amiela’s face. It still felt impossibly difficult to drag her gaze away from each enormous eye socket of the silent creature. “Do you want to take a picture with it?”
“Are we really allowed?” Eulalie reached into her pocket for the disposable camera. “I mean, there’s no signs saying not to, but, um... It still just feels like we aren’t even really supposed to be in here yet, you know?”
“What ever happened to ‘fuck their authority?’” Amiela found herself grinning when Eulalie pretended to scowl at that. “They sold us the tickets. And stamped them.” Amiela shrugged. “And I’ve only ever seen signs about not taking flash photography around the paintings and stuff upstairs.” She moved to hold out her hand. “Let’s do it.”
Mischief returned swiftly to Eulalie’s gaze. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Pictures aren’t vandalism.” Amiela scoffed. She reached up to catch the camera when Eulalie tossed it towards her. “Not like little Miss: ‘I secretly drew glow-in-the-dark penises all over the walls and bell tower of the school administration building; oh gee, how did those hooligans ever get up so high there with so much paint without a ten story ladder?’”
Eulalie tried her best to look equally outraged and direly offended by such words, but she simply could not stop herself from cackling a peal of raucous laughter. “Oh gods, if you’d seen that stuck up bitches’ face when she saw..!”
But Eulalie halted when the very sound of it pinged and floated and reverberated high over every single curve of the looming skeleton, swirling over the walls and sleek stone in the exact same way a voice would rise and linger across the lofty ceiling of some grand, ancient cathedral.
Her expression dropped when her exclaimed words rang over and over again, repeating, repeating, blurring each time in the tonal resonance until they were unrecognizable beyond the faint cadence of her voice. Amiela felt it ripple through her eardrums as well, some strange oscillation that curled and coiled from deep within the sleek interior of the skeleton’s hollow throat.
Eulalie nearly began to look sheepish again. “The acoustics in here are... Crazy, huh?”
“Yeah. Well. We’re not drawing dicks all over this guy.” Amiela shifted into a better position to take a photograph. “He’s too cool. And the people who run this place probably aren’t anything like your headmistress.”
“She does suck. All of them do. Except the ones in my dorm. And some of the quiet people, I guess. But, I...” Eulalie weathered a prolonged, weary sigh. “Oh, Amiela. I still really wish you could go to school with me.” She did not strike any silly poses beside the fossil that time, or speak up as loud as she did before. Perhaps Eulalie respected the sheer presence of it too much to goof around beneath its shadow. “We’d make it so much fun! You and me, we’d get through all of the bullshit together...”
“Would we sneak chocolate-covered locusts into her lunch?” Amiela smiled a little more when Eulalie giggled. She made haste to take as many pictures as she could of the genuine mirth glinting over Eulalie’s features. “Well. Blame my bad luck, I guess.”
Eulalie pouted at that. “Ugh. Why don’t they make schools for us? Then you wouldn’t have to go through all of this... This stupid ‘hiding’ stuff, when you could just be like how you normally are!”
Amiela raised a careful eyebrow. She muttered her next few words under her breath. “We really shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“Right, right. I know.” Eulalie groaned through an only somewhat exaggerated fit of pouting. “I just wish things were different.”
Amiela glanced off to the side, where something quite different began to draw her forward. Neatly ordered rows of display cases stood along the wall. The accompanying exhibit was arranged in a circular fashion, placed along the outer circuit of the ringed area.
Eulalie followed Amiela’s gaze, tilting that head of auburn hair to see what had caught her friend’s attention. Neither of them had really noticed the display portion before, not with the far more prominent behemoth coiled all around the upper heights of the room.
Eulalie stepped ahead to navigate past a set of velvet rope queue barriers. She barely even waited for Amiela to follow before she moved to inspect the smaller displays. “Wow. They definitely went digging.”
Beneath panels of solid glass, they could both see forked shards of unusually patterned bones, miniature spines and femurs of various species, arranged with larger chunks of fossilized organic tissue and plant life. They even spotted glittering samples of mineralized ore: tiny, scale-shaped specimens that oddly mimicked the same glossy blue sheen as the giant cartilaginous beast.
Amiela wondered then, could those minerals be casting the same sort of inner light from deep inside, or were they merely reflecting the eerie glow from the ancient creature? She turned to look back up towards the lofty old skeleton, but Amiela found she could not really decide for sure. She stepped a few paces back to take a few more photographs, careful to try and get clear images of the information plaques.
They both observed the various displays in silence, wandering across the mosaic dais of the hall for a few more minutes or so. Amiela began to feel more like her bootheels were clicking and chiming over solid, shimmering sapphire. Or perhaps it was more like some form of ancient glass, she wondered, or even the glistening mountain of ice the beast had once slumbered beneath for a countless stretch of centuries.
Amiela tried to make the words of each various display plate make sense, but it was growing harder by the moment. The edges of her vision seemed to blur. When she finally forced her chin to rise, it nearly felt like the weight of an ocean was pressing down over her cheeks, coursing without sound over her eyes and lungs and heartbeat.
Her throat almost hurt. She recalled the fiercely metallic sensation of blood between her teeth, over her tongue, even when she knew it was not her own, it was still her own memory, unbidden, even if it felt like she was glimpsing a sky and clouds and rushing air she had not ever drawn breath to witness, a world unknown to her and everyone around her, yet more solid and true and real than any earth her feet had graced or felt settle fully beneath herself.
Amiela’s gaze slowly dragged over the words etched deep into fine copper, phrases her mind could so easily claw over and grasp, yet not sink into, not truly, not in a way that made sense to her splintered sense of reasoning.
Leviathan extracted from the far edge of the world; genus unknown to modern-
But it became all the more difficult to even examine anything in that strange, weighted realm of absolute silence when the sensation of being watched began to feel so palpable in the air.
Amiela felt a deeper shiver touch her spine. And yet it was, oddly, not unpleasant. Even without remaining eyes, she simply could not ignore the fact that the mere sight of it made her instincts crawl, thrumming with the impossible notion that the gaze of the long-dead beast was still there in the room with them, somehow.
She felt Eulalie’s hand brush her own through the stillness. It was the only thing that still anchored her there, Amiela reasoned, that kept her from drifting off to depths unknown, even if no faint snippets of logic in her reeling mind could ever truly prove it.
When it felt like there was nothing left for them to observe, Amiela and Eulalie each found themselves making for the exit, shoulder to shoulder.
They stepped further into the dusty basement corridor. Eulalie reached out to try and reclaim the camera from Amiela’s other hand. “I’ll go get these developed later.”
“Are you sure?” Amiela hesitated. “I don’t think it’s free-”
“Yeah. You paid for the camera already. And you paid for our tickets.” Eulalie nodded. “I’ll pay to get the pictures printed. Somewhere they won’t try and gouge us for it. It’s not like the gift shop can put a lock on the film canister, or anything.”
Amiela still did not release her grip. “You paid for my jacket.”
“Yes, because you’re a silly little woman who doesn’t care if you end up freezing to death!” Eulalie stuck out her tongue and reached to fluff her hands all over Amiela’s hair. “Now, let me be even more nice and get these printed into a cool album for us!”
“Okay, okay. Fine...” Amiela laughed a bit and let her take it. She held up her empty hands. “I give in.”
They left the illuminated hall together, stepping side by side. Eulalie stared at the camera and smiled. Amiela swore she felt her heartbeat quicken just a little whenever Eulalie’s arm gently bumped over her own.
But as her fingers moved to unmuss her hair from Eulalie’s teasing, Amiela did begin to wonder why she felt more than the slightest bit reluctant to leave the strange exhibit behind, especially while her reeling nerves began to feel just as relieved to not be standing there beneath the long, smooth outline of such ancient jaws any longer.
Amiela hesitated and glanced over her shoulder, staring back into the yawning gap of the dusty pathway, even while Eulalie flounced aside to bid her cheerful goodbyes to the bored young man at the ticket counter.
There was simply something unnameable about the way Amiela’s heart tugged in the opposite direction from her footsteps, as if there were still scores left unknown to the fossilized beast and the hollow, yet melodious sound of echoing bones than Amiela could ever possibly begin to understand.
She swore her blood stirred quietly in her veins. But when Amiela finally turned back to peer at the eager face of her friend, she hurried on to follow after her instead.
Short Line Breaker [https://nautiluca.com/wp-content/uploads/Short_Line_Breaker.png]
There was not much left in the museum they really wanted to see. Eulalie did insist on visiting the gift shop herself before they departed that day, gawking and pointing and gazing rather smugly over at Amiela when they both caught sight of the price board for the photo-developing booth.
Amiela eventually managed to drag Eulalie past the front checkout area to browse the more interesting display stands beyond it.
“Why do they always have the coolest umbrellas in these places?!” Eulalie twirled around a colorful umbrella by the pole. She watched how the watercolor hues spun around in such lovely pastel circles above her head. “Is that like, a rule? That museum gift shops get the best umbrellas ever?”
“I don’t know.” Amiela eyed a particularly expensive set of binoculars locked behind a glass case. She imagined her wallet yelping aloud and cringing away from her hand at the mere sight of it. “I wish I could get myself an income, or something. I have my savings, but I’m not supposed to touch those yet.” She frowned and looked aside from the display. “I miss my summer job.”
“It’s not like you really need it.” Eulalie placed the umbrella back atop a nearby shelf. She picked up a small replica of a famous statue instead, squinting to examine the finer details. “I mean, your aunt’s pretty well off. Maybe even more than my parents, you know?” Her gaze edged over to eye the cabinet Amiela had left behind. “You could probably just mention something like that and she’d have it wrapped up for your next birthday before you even knew it.”
“That’s not the point. I want my own things.” Amiela paced a bit further around the aisle. She slowly looked back and forth at all the various shelves laden with intricately expensive merchandise. “I... I want to earn it.” Her footstep paused before the aisle that led back to the entrance. “Your parents are just as rich, but you still had that job at the bookstore.”
“Well, yeah. But they said it’s so I can ‘appreciate the value of money.’” Eulalie pretended to briefly gag. She tried on a colorful silk scarf instead, wrapping it loosely around the one she already wore. “Your aunt doesn’t really think that’s a problem with you, right?”
Amiela felt her shoulders stiffen. A warm, unbidden scent-memory poured in with vast rushing silence over her mind, the faraway flavors of rich blueberry and lemon; the very first time her aunt had ever taken her along for a full day of shopping since she’d been brought to live beside such an enigmatic, distant relative.
She remembered sitting there for the first few hours in total silence, stunned right down into unspoken awe for nearly the entire duration of the experience.
Amiela’s younger self had never once seen such a grand array of mercantile establishments, much less a proper modern marketplace. She was led all around and guided through the streets and walkways by her aunt’s gentle hand, brought back and forth from shop to shop, where the only real break they took was a somewhat leisurely lunch at an outdoor cafe beside the promenade.
She still remembered the warmth of the smile her aunt gave her when Amiela’s voice gasped aloud, marveling at how good the taste of vanilla cream soda and chocolate petit fours felt over her tongue.
Amiela’s younger self had soon been brought right back into the task of shopping with a small box of candies clutched in her grasp, purchased for her from the restaurant counter. She remembered holding on so tight to the box, gripping it with slightly trembling hands, so much that the cardboard remained somewhat bent when she finally stopped grasping it.
She still kept staring down at them, long after her aunt went back to trying on hats and shawls and so many other fine garments, contented with the fact that her little niece was captured instead by those wonderfully glittering confections.
Amiela had sworn the colorful striped candies shone just as glossily as the jewels on the rings her aunt wore.
It had felt like such a dire shame to even open the sleek box that contained them, much less consume any of those lovely sweets. But Amiela simply could not help but try at least one, especially while her aunt kept busying herself with far more uninteresting things, like examining numerous more shoes and stoles and all sorts of fashionable clothing.
The first sweet swirl of candy made Amiela’s mouth sing with the taste of blueberry with sugared lemon for the rest of the day, so much that the flavor itself twined inseparably with the rest of that cozy old memory.
It was only then, finally, at the very end of that longest afternoon, when her aunt had practically dragged along that tiny niece of hers into one last store, despite Amiela’s soft little protests that she was tired and just wanted to go home already; it was there where her aunt told her to go off and find one more thing as a reward for such good behavior, to run along and choose any single present out from the rows upon rows of magnificent children’s toys lining the shelves of that particular shop.
Amiela remembered the very next day when her aunt bid her to play checkers out under the wisteria vine, blooms near-faded from the first faint hint of frost, yet still richly lovely and lush in the arched roof of the gazebo.
She had insisted the little horse would play that round for her, pushing the tile pieces along with a soft fabric hoof and claiming the plush beast was very smart for doing so.
Her aunt, for a time, gazed at the sight in a way where her brow pinched equally in bafflement and silent rebuke. But her features slowly smoothed out and evened while she gazed at how young the little girl sitting across from her truly was, even if she’d just pretended that her stuffed animal had been the one to deftly capture several of her aunt’s checker tiles, halfway spurring her way to victory.
Amiela recalled a more recent memory of that well-worn, hugged-to-tatters gray horse. It was the very same lump of fabric still waiting along a low shelf of her bedroom, far back at home. When Amiela thought of it, she felt her lips tug before she could even stifle the urge to. The phantom scents of blueberry and lemon swirled back into her mind from the tip of her tongue, just like the very first moment she ever saw it among all the other velvet creatures: all glossy and lovely and new.
If Amiela had still believed the stuffed animal could feel things (as her mind so often did back when she was so much smaller) she would have felt terrible for not bringing it along on vacation with her. But the little horse would be far safer at home, she reasoned. And Amiela knew Eulalie would probably tease her (gently, as always) at that age if she’d happened to glimpse it back at the hotel.
But Eulalie herself merely stood there, idling along with a more quiet sense of patience for her friend. She kept a knowing smile as she waited for Amiela to return from her little daydream, busying herself with trying on more silken scarves in the meantime.
Amiela finally broke the silence. “It’s... It’s just hard to ask her for things when she’s already given me so much.” With a sigh half-muffled through her next exhale, Amiela stared off into the distance, watching the hints of clear blue sky beyond the fabric draped beside the gift shop windows. “She didn’t have to do everything for me. But she did.”
“Because she loves you, silly.” Eulalie smiled. She walked back up beside Amiela. “Listen. If you don’t want to ask her for stuff, maybe you could ask her to do things with you instead? I know she’s been busy lately with everything, but maybe once life gets a little less crazy?”
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“Yeah. You’re right.” Amiela did feel more than a small twinge of guilt for not having spent as much time with her aunt as she once had, years before. “I just wish I... I could be more normal for her?”
“No way. There’s nothing wrong with you.” Eulalie took Amiela by the hand again. With a warm little giggle, she began to stroll right off along with her, guiding her past the bustle and countless racks of colorful trinkets in the lavish gift shop. “And what’s life without a little weirdness, right?”
Her words brought a more subdued laugh to Amiela’s voice. “Yeah. That’s... One way of looking at it.” She smiled in a weaker way than she truly wanted, allowing Eulalie to lead her away through the museum store. “At least it makes things interesting.”
The two of them were nearly about to leave without even buying anything, when Eulalie suddenly halted right in her tracks at the sight of a towering wall entirely crammed full of finely-sewn stuffed animals. One in particular caught her gaze and held it.
Amiela slowly glanced back and forth, lifting her gaze between her friend and the tiny, soft puffball of fluff sitting grandly atop the highest shelf. She raised a single eyebrow, before Amiela raised the hand Eulalie was still holding to gesture at the miniature plush. “You want the baby polar lion, don’t you?”
Her attention was well and truly seized. Eulalie tried not to whimper. “...Yes.”
That very same little bundle of pale fluff soon sat proudly between the two of them, placed off to the side on the table of a far different restaurant than before.
The grand dining hall by the sea claimed a far broader space than the informal little street cafe of the city corner. It was also much less crowded, though the entire upper balcony and attached ballroom did hold a significantly more refined air about it.
The printed menus did not have any tourist translations whatsoever, for one thing. While Eulalie flipped through her guidebook with a befuddled stare fixed over her face, Amiela eventually managed to flag down the only member of the nearby waitstaff who shared a familiar language with her.
“Sheesh. You’re so lucky your aunt’s Beryaude.” Eulalie rested her chin over her hands. Her gaze traveled off further to peer beyond the windows, watching the ocean waves crash silently against the shore. “I’d think you were a native speaker if I didn’t know better.”
Amiela did not have the heart to correct her. She was indeed a native speaker. She’d grown up predominantly trilingual, with more than a few other languages mixed in after her aunt gained custody and decided Amiela’s latent potential in that area simply could not go to waste.
With a slight fidget, Amiela looked down at her hands. She was more than aware it made her accent sound oddly neutral to most ears, leaning more towards the common tongue rather than either dialect of her parents or maternal aunt.
Eulalie sighed with quiet contentment. She teased her fingertips over the condensation on her water glass, tracing the dewy droplets away. “I’m just glad we didn’t have to try and point at something random on the menu and look like total idiots.”
“Even if we did, chances are it would have been something nice.” Amiela found her gaze drawn further as well when a different waiter walked past with a steaming tray of cheese-bread and ceramic bowls practically overflowing with fragrant boiled seafood. “Everything so far smells amazing.”
“Yeah. That’s true.” Eulalie waited until she gained Amiela’s full attention again. She smiled just as nonchalantly as she could. “So. Tell me how things have been.”
“Um. ‘Things?’” Amiela began to feel entirely skeptical of Eulalie’s tone. “What sort of ‘things’ are we talking about?”
“You know, things.” Eulalie’s lips eased into a more clever smirk. “They might not make schools for us, missy, but you got to go to the next best thing.”
“Oh.” Amiela glanced down at the delicate bracelet tied around her wrist. She fought the urge to brush her fingers across it. The pale metal still felt like a band of ice looped over her skin. “It went okay.”
Eulalie gave her a much more exasperated look. “I need details.”
“Listen, I just mean, it... It wasn’t even all that eventful, honestly. But-” Amiela desperately tried to think of any change of topic. She felt like her own gaze was boring holes in the floor beside their table. Why in the world did Eulalie ever want to talk about that when there was almost nothing Amiela could say aloud, not without exposing what they truly were?
Even still, that girl just kept on staring at her, unwilling to relent. Eulalie slowly tapped her fingertips over the smooth tablecloth nearest to her seat.
“Well, uh. Most people there seemed pretty nice.” Amiela’s stance shifted where she sat. “Marion was there. So that was cool. We talked a little. She’s still helping out with Elanor’s horses and everything in the summer. She invited me back again. I don’t know if she really meant it. She looked busy with some of the people there, so I didn’t want to bug her.” Amiela’s gaze edged further. The slightest hint of color rose over her neck, filling her cheeks with the same light shade of scarlet. “Most of the others didn’t really want much to do with me, but I’m used to it. And they didn’t say much. None of them even called me a canina, or anything. So that went alright.”
Something about Eulalie’s gaze seemed to unquestionably sharpen. “Don’t call yourself that.”
“Why not?” After a moment of strained silence, Amiela tore her gaze back from the floor to give her friend an equally pointed look. “Everyone thinks it.”
“You... You just shouldn’t.” Eulalie slowly crossed her arms over her chest. She fixed her gaze on Amiela’s distinct features. But then she lost her nerve and looked away. “It’s not... You aren’t like that.” She shook her head. Eulalie cleared her throat. “Well, fine. Anyway. So, any new friends, you think?” Despite the sudden flash of fierce protectiveness burning fast over Eulalie’s eyes, she reached aside to gently pet the mane of the miniature stuffed lion on the table. “It’d be so cool to really, actually meet more people like us, you know, and make friends who aren’t like, a bazillion years old and boring. That’s why you’re so fun.”
“Well. I don’t think I did. Not really.” Amiela felt her flush creep deeper over her cheeks and twinge them. She’d already tried her absolute hardest just to not be noticed by any of her peers, but she wasn’t about to admit that part out loud. “I don’t really... Need more friends, do I?”
Eulalie seemed as if she was about to say something entirely else on the matter, but the strange look that bristled high and passed between them ended with only a slight twitch of her jaw.
“The lessons were really cool, though.” Amiela nodded to herself and drew in a shaky breath to help settle her nerves. “We got to learn a lot of our own history. And it was actually the interesting kind, things I’ve actually never heard of, either. That was the best part.”
While she kept speaking, Amiela tried her best to smile more casually at her friend, but Eulalie’s expression was somehow becoming ever so complex.
With a stifled note of unease, Amiela forced herself to just keep talking and not let her words quail away from her own mouth. “Um, the elder lecturers spoke about some new thought experiments I’d never even heard about, stuff like theories on why long-range telecommunications and mechanical air travel might even be possible someday, if they can ever just fix the-”
Eulalie interrupted her with yet another smirk. “So, no new friends. But did you see anyone there you liked?”
The heated bout of blush crept all the more high along Amiela’s cheeks. She swore it would curl the rest of her to cinders. “What?”
“Come on, you’re hiding something.” Eulalie slowly waved her index finger around like she’d caught the girl red-handed. “Who is it?”
Amiela struggled to keep her voice calm and clear. “There is honestly nobody-”
But Eulalie quite clearly savored the feeling of having Amiela backed so soundly into a corner. “You can tell me. Is he cute?”
Just like that, everything whirling around inside her mind ground to a dead and utter halt. It must have shown over her face just as plainly, the bare and honest truth that the idea of that sounded just as appealing as scraping off rock-hard gum from the bottom of a desk with a chisel.
“Oh!” Eulalie laughed aloud with a sudden sort of giddy cackling, gaining more than a few annoyed glances from the more sophisticated restaurant-goers around her. “Okay wow, I guess not!”
“Gods, keep your voice down..!” Amiela exhaled a sharper breath as she slumped against her chair in utter embarrassment. “This place, it... This is a really fancy restaurant.”
“Okay, okay. Whew. Yeah. Sorry.” Eulalie swiped away a single mirthful tear. “Oh, man, it’s just the look you had... Wow, okay. Right. Were the boys all as ugly as donkeys or something?”
Amiela took only a moment to consider that. “Yep.”
“Aw, too bad. Maybe the genetics are garbage in more than one way.” Eulalie leaned forward and sighed with pure merriment. “Hey. Listen, I know you still don’t want a proper débutante, but we’ll get you set up someday, okay? Someone nice and sweet, just like you. Don’t worry.” She gave Amiela a warmer smile. “A bit less shy, though, if I had my pick. Someone to get you out from that shell a little more with anyone else but me.” Eulalie grinned and rested her chin against her hands, elbows propped ever so casually over the tale. “Maybe we could even find someone fun to hang out with here, like at the festival tomorrow.”
Her words reminded Amiela of when Eulalie had been dancing and passing liquor with total strangers just the night before, dragging her right along for the ride. Amiela felt a sudden pang of her morning hangover creep back in and grip over her mind again.
Eulalie’s voice became more gentle. “I know what you’re thinking. We won’t get as tipsy as last night.” She shook her head. “That got a bit... Wild, even for me.”
“We had better not.” Amiela reached up to massage her forehead from the mere memory of it. “That was... Beyond tipsy.”
“Hey, we’re young, right?” Eulalie raised her glass of water. “They’re always telling us to enjoy it.”
A softer smile eased over her lips. Amiela lifted her own glass and lightly clinked it against Eulalie’s, water rippling a quiet echo in her glass.
Line Breaker [https://nautiluca.com/wp-content/uploads/Line_Breaker.png]
The full span of the galaxy stretched over the mirrorlike surface. Only a scarce few droplets of red falling away from her teeth could disturb the perfect reflection.
Her fangs sank deeper beneath flesh and caught, ripping the smooth texture of broken scales and fins and twitching, bleeding, spasming gills.
Ranya snarled low. Her shoulders bunched. Her body rippled with coiled, rigid musculature. Hackles raised: the sleek, silken sheen of her fur was somehow both as soft as velvet and just as primed as a razor, without flaw. Her tail curled around in a serpentine spiral, sweeping back and forth beside the water’s edge.
“Stupid...” Ranya leaned back and coughed hard over the needly point of a jagged fish bone. She grimaced, swallowed it, then hacked out another rasping breath and snarled. “I should’ve said nothing. Who does she think she is, gods, with all of this tortured soul crap!?”
Ranya bit down even harder over the dead, twitching animal. With one savage lunge, she tore back yet another dripping mouthful.
“Anyone else would be lining up to hang out with me...” Ranya muttered against the shredded flesh crammed full into her mouth. “Who else in this dingy old world gets to say they have a demon for a friend? Not many. But you know that already, Ami!”
Ranya hissed and ripped forth another bite before she even finished chewing the last. The silvered trout soon laid completely limp under the tensing press of her talons.
“Why won’t you ever listen? I... Gods, I would do anything you wanted!” Ranya’s eyes narrowed further. She swallowed the mouthfuls of fish. She then slowly turned her gaze high instead, skyward, towards the long, silent expanse of starlight. Her eyes watched the last few traces of moonlight disappear over the edge of the canyon walls. “I’d take the stars from the sky. And the clouds. Every one. Catch all of them for you, if I could. Anything. Even...”
Ranya felt the most sudden urge to thread her fangs down through wisping strands of auburn instead, to catch the blooded sweet taste of fear that panged and surged far beyond the primitive texture of fish.
“If I ever get my claws over that chickenshit, redheaded bitch...” Ranya’s snarl boiled, churning like balefire in her chest. “Ooh, you’ve got it coming, girlie. I don’t think even Ami would try to stop me.”
She knew it was a lie before it even left her lips. Ranya snapped her fangs shut and quivered.
“I’d tear out her heart. And eat it.” Ranya bared her teeth instead towards the midnight sky and pinned her ears back tight. “Or give it to you, Ami. That would make everything fair again, wouldn’t it?” Something deeper in Ranya’s eyes withered and died. “But, it... Would it only make you hate me even more?”
Her ears went limp. With a low shiver, Ranya slowly rose up from the shore. She swallowed down the last few scraps of fish. But inside her belly, she still felt hollow, unceasingly open and cold. She squeezed her eyes shut and leaned forward.
Her body dropped beneath those tranquil waters, sinking like a stone, unraveling, surging forth to unleash herself again. She became a far sleeker beast than she’d ever been before. Even the most powerful, primed feral cat could never quite hope to match the utterly streamlined surface of a hulking leopard seal.
Water crashed and roiled. Slick shadows darted further, fleeing from the mere sight of her. Her muscles pulsed, rippling over the inner gleam of solidly thrashing musculature as she swam her way even deeper.
Ranya’s body wove back and forth between hazy pillars of sunken logs and flowing curtains of river grass. Her eyes glinted, slits of gold in the absolute dark. The thick greenery billowed like smoke beneath the waves, a lush, tangled fog that kept her massive silhouette shrouded from sight.
She flexed her head to peer up, staring out towards the celestial light over the river surface instead. The heavens glistened there, spanning a world of starlight along the rippling water. She could see them all there, collected in that place, the very same stars as always: their ancient patterns, patient constellations of revered zodiac beasts.
Her nostrils twitched, leaking only the smallest trace of whispering air. She watched how those bubbles rose up high and drifted away together, floating out in pairs from the treacherous, murky depths.
Ranya’s lip curled to reveal her teeth. She thrashed her tail hard in one long bubbling swipe.
Again and again, she surged forward, racing through those darker waters, chasing, coursing, cornering, catching those panicked little fish between her teeth as she snapped their fragile bodies in two. The deep green riverbed grew thicker and more dense with the haze of blood and shattered scales. Her eyes, pupils blown with utter furor, darted back and forth to track the frenzied flailing of her frightened, fleeing prey.
Ranya’s jaws filtered the much smaller river creatures between the arched grooves of her hooked mammalian teeth, catching the bulk of aquatic insects and tiny freshwater shrimp. They were crushed to a paste of nutrients between the curved ridges of her molar fangs. Her throat soon filled with oily flesh, the cloying taste of watery viscera as Ranya devoured every last scrap that passed over her tongue.
Even still, the hollow of her stomach felt cold.
Ranya lashed herself harder, swirling deeper throughout the murk, bellowing a silent, most echoing howl into the furthest depths of the riverbed. Her eyes each stung.
Even then, she could feel it drain off and swirl and wither, the full force of rage as it trickled ever so smoothly away. It faded, despite her desperate efforts to try and grasp out and claw it, rend it, hold it tight inside her grasp and never lose even a single fleeting ounce of it.
Her strength only left her there in silence, dying beneath the starlit night. Liquid that felt like stinging icewater poured out to replace the blood in her veins, so cold, cold, cold.
Ranya would have sniffled to herself, were she not so far beneath the water. Instead, she covered up her eyes with each of her front flippers, hiding her face away while she drifted without spirit between the billowing water-weeds.
It was humans who were the actual, terrible, most horrible of problems, she assured herself beneath the lack of moonlight. If only Amiela had been born a seal instead, Ranya could simply nudge gently at her nose and bring her fish instead, or even treasured little gifts of tasty plump polar waterbirds until her affections were noticed, appreciated, and maybe even returned. It would all be so much more simple.
She would sing to her there every night below the ocean waves, drifting along in her wake as they both swam forward together, following the glitter of starlit bubbles from the tail of one another until they were fluidly dancing beneath the glow of midnight, a pair of wayward, contented beasts lost soundly in the frozen starlight of the north.
But of course, Amiela was not a seal.
No. No, that girl just had to have been born as the most annoyingly perplexing of all species to ever walk that wretched planet, but that was what made her Amiela.
Ranya knew, (though she would not quite yet admit it to herself) that anything less, any other species, could never have been able to spur her heart towards such drastic actions. Humans might have indeed been animals, similar enough in manner to Ranya’s own species, but despite their differences, kinship felt more than obvious given the superior intelligence of their minds. An animalistic seal would never do.
Her snout exhaled a long, bubbling snort. Ranya’s nostrils twitched, flexing there in a more ponderous way than anything more murderous. It would have looked to any observer as if she was considering her outburst, whether or not she should continue to subject the river denizens to her wildest frustrations.
A faraway memory crossed her mind in that place, visions of the very rare squabble Amiela would occasionally have so long ago with Eulalie. Ranya remembered padding herself softly over the parlor floor to watch her there. She would peer up over the arm of the couch, whiskers twitching, to watch how that girl curled herself ever so tight under a blanket beside the soft crackle of the television, where Amiela tried to keep the softness of her cries just as muffled as she possibly could.
Ranya would observe the way that tall woman with the big feather hat carried over two saucers full of something sweet and cold towards her crestfallen niece. The old woman would set the bowls down on the coffee table, pet gentle hands over her niece’s hair while she sat close beside Amiela on the cushioned sofa, whispering soft little assurances that such things were entirely normal, as natural as the sky and stars, that she should not worry herself too badly for it.
And then, Ranya could just catch those faint words when she swiveled her pointy ears, the hushed explanation that every set of friends in the world would have to endure such moments of uncertainty. It was a universal truth, the girl was told.
In the weeks beyond, the next time those two first came to see each other again, it was like nothing had even happened.
Amiela usually was the first to give in and pretend she was not upset. Eulalie would later joke about whatever silly little tiff they’d had, laughing that nothing could ever possibly bring those two apart for long.
That was, at least, before one particular incident.
Ranya breathed out once more, weary and slow. She wanted that, that most fuzzy sensation from before, watching Amiela’s aunt reach out and comfort her there, touch her hair and shoulders and kiss her forehead, brush her hands in soft circles over her cheeks to chase each one of those tears away, sit beside her in the warm glow of the evening television and tell her that everything would always be alright again someday.
But Ranya knew she would find nothing of the sort on that particular night, no gentle familial touches or shared gifts of fudgy, gooey ice cream.
Curse the efficiency of her own bodily processes, Ranya mused, her innate ability of extracting energy in only mere moments from those dozens upon dozens of river fish and insects she’d just devoured.
That particular biological quirk did come in handy for keeping her energy up, not to mention shoving along some of her more vital power into Amiela as well when the silly thing decided that being a witch meant she could just skip dinner again, but it did absolutely nothing to help soothe the emptiness churning sourly inside Ranya’s gut. Nor could it truly replace her favorite human actually taking the time to care for herself enough to nibble down a proper meal.
No, Ranya wanted that other feeling, the one that Amiela so rarely used to ever speak about: the much slower, sleepier sort of sensation that came just after enjoying a warm dinner with pleasant company, curling up close together on the sofa and listening to the radio spin soothing tones long into the early hours of midnight.
It wasn’t as if Ranya could never achieve that on her own. She could slow her bodily processes down to match a similar rate of digestion as any typical mammalian species. But it would simply never happen that way, not while her blood was still flowing so hot.
She needed to calm herself down first. Ranya knew, in her heart of hearts, that her agitated furor could not hope to last much longer. She slowly opened her eyes to peer back up at the surface, gazing past the thick churn of watery murk. It would all be so much easier, she knew, with something tasty to mull between her teeth.
The wet scales of a river salmon slopped down without ceremony over the rocky shore. With a grumbling sort of huff, Ranya hauled herself up as well over the edge of the riverside. She clambered forward with her flippers until her entire sleek bulk, midsection and smooth tail and all, the massive form of a pinniped body was resting far across the low grass instead.
Her eyes stared at the dead salmon. Ranya slowly licked her fangs. Almost as good as chocolate ice cream, she reasoned, even without deep red sugared berries or pillowy tufts of marshmallow syrup drizzled on top.
Savor it, that’s what Amiela always used to say; Ranya would surely enjoy it more if she just took the time to slow down and appreciate the more subtle flavors of whatever she ate.
She gradually sank her fangs deep beneath the salmon flesh. Ranya slowly tucked into the meal with a rumbling purr. It was good, she realized, warm and tangy, savory with the fine sensation of rich scarlet flesh. It almost began to remind her of one certain particular notion, the cherry red salmon meat with scales shimmering a soft silvered gray.
A twig snapped further off in the undergrowth. Ranya only snorted and kept chewing her meal.
But when the reeds themselves shivered, twitching, and ever so warily began to part, Ranya slid her gaze over to find whatever might be creeping there in the shadows of the river underbrush.
A long yet delicate snout brushed past the grass and twitched. Ranya watched how that slender nose became a face, then a keen set of eyes, and finally a narrow, clever jawline. It was a small creature, nimble and bold.
A jackal, Ranya realized. But she was not quite sure if it was the same beast she saw that morning or merely some other wandering, restless animal.
“Hm. Just a critter.” Ranya breathed a soft huff. “Shoo, now. Go on. Get lost.” She rumbled her words over a full bite of tasty salmon flesh. “This is mine. And I don’t particularly feel like sharing.”
The sleek little animal only sniffed again, and crept closer.
“Back off!” Ranya snarled a sudden guttural bark. She slapped one of her flippers down hard over the shore of pebbles. “You’re not much bigger than this fish is, little dog!”
The jackal hesitated. But then the canny little beast inclined its head, staring directly at the big, juicy salmon just waiting there beneath Ranya’s flippers.
“Oh.” Ranya’s ire chuckled over a wry, toothy grimace. “You think I’m just some big dumb seal that isn’t fast enough to chase you away from here, is that it..?” She crooned her words at the wild jackal, grinning and curling her upper lip high to bare the full, enormous span of her own eerily canine teeth. “I could break you apart in one bite, little doggy. Just like-”
But the animal still trotted forward, lingering just out of range of immediate striking distance from Ranya’s jaws. With a flick of its bushy tail, the little beast merely sat down and yawned. The jackal kept its gaze fixed directly on the dead fish laying over the shore.
Ranya grimaced to herself. “Ami would hate me. And I don’t really want that girl’s heart. It’d probably taste just like dishsoap. Bleh. Or broccoli.” Her lip curled far less direly than before. “I don’t know what Ami ever saw in her. Boring as a bag of wet mice. And just about as sharp as one too.” She hated how her features relaxed even further in a muffled sort of resignation. “But, she... If Ami wanted, really still wanted-”
The jackal tilted its angular head at her. The beast shuffled those little nimble paws, though it did not stop staring at the prey beneath her taloned flippers.
Ranya leaned forward to sniff closer to the little creature. “Oh! You’re a girl, just like me.” She narrowed her eyes to examine the visible little bumps she noticed on the belly of the seated animal. “And a mum, is that right? You’ve got puppies somewhere then, don’t you?”
Something much further beyond her anger, a thing far deeper within Ranya’s chest felt like it clenched impossibly tight, yet then ever so gradually loosened. Ranya still glowered down at that bold little beast, but she understood why the sly mother dog was acting so brazenly.
“If your pups are hungry, then you should really be out there looking for mice and birds, you know. Not begging for scraps from me.” Ranya snorted again while she chewed over a bite. She slowly shook one of her clawed flippers to scold the waiting jackal. “I don’t do handouts. Not even-”
But she remembered him. The softest outline of Olive’s features flashed in the corners of her mind, that most vivid memory of the way it all brightened when he’d looked up at her and realized how much food she’d brought along back for him and Amiela, there at the top of the prairie tower.
The feeling inside Ranya’s heart curled tight and twisted deeper, cinching like vines without thorns to sink in and bite. Her eyes slipped shut as if it ached to even think about.
“I... Ugh. Gods. Don’t look at me like that.” Ranya wished her mental image of him would stop smiling at her that way, as if she’d just brought back a chocolate sundae with extra sprinkles rather than a few scrawny birds and a dead rabbit. “He’s only some lost little human. Practically a baby! He can’t even feed himself properly, that’s why. And he looked really hungry and thin, so...”
The jackal glanced away and sneezed.
Ranya whined out a low, groaning grumble. She rubbed her face tight with one of her flippers. “He just makes Ami happy! Human beings like things like that; they get all soft and mushy about cute little things, like kittens, or puppies, or annoying, stupid whiny redheads, or little kids for them to take care of, that’s why I’ve been letting him tag along with us, feeding him like that! It isn’t like-” The full strength of Ranya’s voice began to fade. “It’s not like... Like we really need him..?”
The jackal flicked her ears back, unconvinced.
Ranya growled a deeper little rumble and looked away. “He just, he... He made her laugh. I couldn’t-” Her breath rasped and nearly shattered. “I could hardly believe what I was even hearing. I mean, I didn’t think I’d ever-!”
She halted when her words truly broke. Ranya felt her throat ache, swelling far worse than the sting of pointy little fish bones ever could. The sly jackal stared deeper into her gaze.
“I just want her to be happy. I want her to laugh, like she always used to.” Ranya refused to admit that her eyes were fiercely watering. “And I’ve gone and made her miserable. Why does everything I do have to blow up in my face, every time..?”
The stars burned further than her words could reach. The sky above churned with unseen clouds, as passive and weighted as the cosmos looming beyond it.
“But that little boy, he’s-” Ranya shook her head and lightly trembled. “There’s just... Something so honest and sweet about him. I don’t know. Something better than all of this mess? And I think Ami knows it. I think she sensed it before I even could. If anything, he... He’s just like how she used to be.” Ranya sighed. She reached down for the half-eaten fish with her front teeth. “So, if anyone deserves a free meal, it’s him.”
The little jackal perked her ears up high when only the smallest scrap of raw salmon dropped down to the ground before her paws. She snapped up the tiny offering and wagged her sleek bushy tail.
“Sheesh. I’d have better luck making a jackal my girlfriend.” Ranya scoffed aloud and scarfed down her own wet mouthful of fish. “Way less chance of getting my face bitten off, too.”
The jackal barked and wagged her tail even more.
“Yeah. Hah, you’re a funny little dog.” Ranya grinned. She waved one of her flippers at the cheerful canine creature. “Cute, but not exactly wifey material. I need someone I can take to the movies without animal control getting called on both of us.” Ranya shook her head. “Someone to grow old and go stargazing with...”
Her mind abruptly conjured the notion of both such things, offering her hand to one much smaller, feeling those quiet fingers actually reach out and accept the touch so freely given. She swore she could see pale skin lit by all the colors of midnight cinema, eyes all aglow beneath each flickering picture.
Ranya swore even deeper that she could feel the plush surface of grass so much later on, when they stepped hand in hand beneath the boughs of early autumn wisteria, golden leaves pushed so softly in the wind. That same breeze would swirl through ashen hair, sweet-scented and fine when it graced Ranya’s senses, calm and steady no matter how sharp her teeth shone when those lips parted, how curved her talons were when they cradled those soft little hands.
She felt her cheeks brighten despite the fact that Ranya was still a rather formidably-shaped leopard seal. She shook her head harder and did her best to clear her throat. “Mm. Well. If you weren’t wild, I’d catch you and give you to kiddo. He could use a real pet, you know. Something soft and nice and sweet to hold. A papillon, maybe. Or a pomeranian.” She eyed those angled edges and keen teeth half-hidden in the jackal’s mouth. “But you... Well.” Ranya closed her eyes and sighed. “You’re just too much like me.”
The little animal stilled. The wild beast lowered her bushy tail fast when the visage before her shifted and blurred, when the bulky, sleek image of a towering seal twisted and narrowed, becoming an ever so much sharper set of eyes, thousandfold bright, a churning sea of slitted pupils that burned like moonlight beneath the realm of midnight.
“Too much...” Ranya smiled again when her flippers became paws, pointed nails gripping down deep over the river pebbles. Her tongue lolled. Her mouth dripped with rivulets of glittering fish blood. She wagged her own tail high, drawing fur right out from silkenly slick skin, wagging it back and forth. “Oh, don’t tell me you’re scared now.”
The jackal turned and vanished with only a rustle of dry river reeds.
Ranya swore her ears did not droop. Her fluffy tail did not sag, nor did she turn away in a slow, most withering sort of sulk to lap up the rest of the remaining salmon, even if the decadent flavor seemed to spoil to saccharine over her tongue.
She padded forward instead to breathe in the sharp little scents where the wild beast just stood, mother and faint smell of puppies alike. But when Ranya stepped nearer towards those clawed prints, she could not help but look down. Her heavy paws dwarfed those tiny marks, the very same as it always felt to practically engulf Amiela’s smaller hands with her own.
Ranya swore she did not shiver. She did not close her eyes and tighten her jaw, clenching those long, most keenly feral teeth that could so easily rip out a human heart if she really, truly wanted.
But she would admit, on that starlit night, though only to herself: to breathing out the lowest echo of a warbling note, the faintest beginning of a solitary, lonely howl.