Previously * [Face to face again, the dark woman reached out and gently clasped her warm fingers around her jaw, forcing their eyes to meet. She watched as Honeysuckle colors sparked in amber depths with an energy that shivered across her skin before the woman simply replied, “Indeed.”]
The rippling pools ebbed and flowed with the tension building between them, their voices mute as her tender fingers released their hold on her jaw and slowly trailed kinetic paths down her neck to pause at her exposed collarbone before retreating back into her dark cloak. The departure tugged a physical withdrawal from the depths of her spine and she bit her soft pink lips to suppress the whimper that rose up her throat.
“What do you desire here that you could not find anywhere else? Besides the obvious, of course,” the older woman asked, her timbered voice an octave deeper and she felt the humming in her veins thrill at the notion she was not alone in this tug of war.
“To answer your call,” she replied easily, as if it was obvious to them both.
But the other woman pulled back a step, her eyes narrowing with slight amusement and disbelief.
“My dear, I have heard the call of many over time and though I have whispered to them in their dreams, I have never beckoned them with a Siren’s song,” she replied, turning and sweeping her arms in gesture to the room around them. “These pools are where their desires have fallen, their hungers fed till dust has snared their bones.”
She turned back to her and stepped close again.
“You saw and heard the creatures that run wild across my lands, did you not?”
She nodded.
“Trolls and fairies, will o' the wisp and water nymphs have mated on my grounds long before I settled here. I may bear master to the Children of the Moon now, and I may even hold court over others like you, but a Siren, my sweet, is something I am not.”
“And yet I hear you,” she replied firmly. She glanced at the pools and watched as their tides began to turn like a vortex descending into oblivion. They foamed and bubbled and popped along their edges as voices began to raise up from their depths, a choir to a faceless conductor.
The older woman followed her gaze and inhaled a sharp breath, her eyes sweeping back up to meet hers with a penetrating stare. Suddenly, in this moment, they were equals standing on sacred ground.
As the woman continued to take her in, eyes trying to unlock answers to questions she obviously could not voice aloud, she felt words begin to flow across her tongue to meet them vocally.
“I have always heard them,” she said, her attention flickering to the pools, “from as far back as I can remember. Phantoms in the night that drifted across my senses like winds in the Highlands. And I always saw you,” she made clear as their eyes met again. “I saw the way they knelt before you, the Kings who tried to conquer you, the Queens who begged against your lips for another night—the Golden Heroes who tossed their honor and their swords into the shadows to never be retrieved again for sovereignty by your side.”
The voices that rose from the tide pools suddenly softened of their own accord to a low harmony, like the song of lovers, as if they knew the next words spoken could storm the emotions both women were concealing behind weathered eyes.
“I felt you,” she whispered, a caress across the monarch. “Your hunger, your heat,” she paused, a soft release and knowing eyes, “your loneliness, your sorrow.”
“Impossible,” breathed out the other woman in defiance though her words flutter with uncertainty.
“Is it?” she questioned with the child like wonder she still possessed. “You have lived lifetimes over and yet your beauty remains unchanged. You have corrupted and healed the souls of the lost, offered asylum to those with needs that drive them to madness yet tossed the carcases of the truly foul to the depths of voids where not often the beings of Middle Earth could retrieve them.”
She closed the remaining gap, their clothes brushing like the hairs of a paintbrush on canvas with each rise and fall of their chests. This close she could smell the lavender and leather that had beckoned her from the foyer and she felt her fingers tremble with the need to wrap them up in the fabric of the cloak that hid just what she wanted to see the most.
“Have you really come to believe, after all this time, that another like you could never be born?” The thought troubled her and as she gazed into her eyes she saw the conflict of truth echoing back.
For that, she reached out and sank her fingers into the folds, bringing their bodies tightly together and sealing their needs into perfect alignment.
“I have come for you and I intend to give you everything you have been waiting for,” she declared between them as their heartbeats found thunder and their eyes flashed like lightning.
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