Ankyra Sound saltwater blood

03.13.2025
hour 23:07 pacific

The waves were rising in her dreams, the water thrashing against the outer stone walls of her den with such force as to invade her sleeping mind. Marina woke with a start from a dream of saltwater filling her den, filling her cursed child's lungs from his first breath. Yet he refused to drown. Was it fear or relief in her trembling limbs?

Neither, perhaps, but the first pains of birth. Twice a mother, thrice now, Marina bore her suffering in weary silence. Only the sea would have heard her cries, anyway; no sisters to bring her comfort, no husband to wait and worry outside. She brought her child into the world — no.

No; the child fell from its bloody cocoon as two, twin souls sharing warmth even in the womb. Twin pearls, so small she wasn't sure they would live. Yet they drew breath, and when tucked at the warmth of her belly they nursed. Marina thought to settle, to sleep.

03.14.2025
hour 00:00 pacific

It felt she'd scarcely closed her eyes when the pain began anew. Fear chilled her and drew her up stiff, but the second act was a swifter affair. Fear gave way to dread, something deeper. Twins again; dark, ruddy, like ancient blood. Drown them, her mind whispered.

She might have, if she could have seen the red moon watching from the sky.

The cold might have taken them then anyway: Marina could do nothing but stare at these two red omens for a time. All the evil she'd already imagined in the yellow eyes of her twin pearls; how could she bear to suffer more? Were they not punishment enough?

But after a time she moved them to her flank, gingerly as if afraid they might bleed at her touch. Four children. Marina could have laughed at the bitter blessing of it. They would all starve.

Instead she slept, and her nightmares consumed her.

The pearl didn't know what he was in his mother's eyes. How could he have known? She had carried him up from the deepest sea, had pried open his shell, and had found not one, but two poisoned treasures inside.

Incomplete without each other. They had made themselves ready for her.

A cry split his throat. As his mother drew him in, his cry subsided, comforted by her touch, swimming in the tension of what the pearl would come to call love, and oblivious, in his simplicity, to the whirlpool swirling through the mind who had given them breath, life, through the crashing waves.

He didn't know what he was in his mother's eyes, nor his part of the nightmare brought down on her silvered head. The boy nestled against her, too weak to do much else, searching for food until he drifted off in the crook of her arm and her restless dreams.

Wriggling, squirming, slithering like a leech fat from the suckling of blood the child clung to the touch of it's mother. Wailing like a banshee it was as if the thing knew of the savagery of which it had been born from, of the circumstance it had been born into.

A storm unwilling to be culled until it found a teat to latch to, the wormish beast gnawed with a mouth not yet fit with the fangs of it's truest form. It would suckle until it hurt to do so any longer, only then releasing to allow itself to sleep.

Determined to grow, determined to live, determined to feed.

It had been he whose eyes flashed in his mother's dreams; the second pearl, the yellow-eyed demon wearing a cherub's smile. Yet he was no demon then, only a boy — less than that, an infant in its first breaths, unknowing of the world or even a sense of self among it all. There was only that first taste of salty sea air, and the warmth of life. Mother and siblings pressed around him.

The newness of it all might have frightened him, but there was something familiar here too. His twin at his side, just as it had always been: two of a kind, facing each moment together. If he was starlight and seafoam, if he was the flash of the sun on the waves filling wolven skin, then his twin too knew the ache and exhaustion of such an ordeal. To be made flesh, to be born into the blood and mess and cold and itching discomfort of it all. To know hunger for the first time.

Wearied, the child ate only a little. Then he rolled up against his brother and joined him in sleep.

The blood moon breaks against the cloudy sky, an omen over the primordial sound. And yet, the satellite hasn't been everpresent. It too, had been born, as had the earth, the ocean, and the very shore the waves fell upon.

A set of perfect conditions that allowed all life to breathe into existence. Under the lunar eclipse, these conditions give way to a pup, young fur already betraying tones of blood. She knows not of the state of affairs that surround her reality, only of a instinctual urge to survive.

Air of seawater brine is the first thing Lucyne inhales.

Shadess had known the sound to be a sacred place to her people. The details of the story she did not know, but knew many a battle had been fought here. A war won of her grandmothers and since had been a place they watched over and made sure it didn't fall into the paws of greed again. 

Shadess strode here in the quiet. The forest of towering trees was dark and thick and she felt that it was only by luck that she was ever able to find the secluded strand beyond. She followed the scent of saltwater at first and then as it grew stronger, she followed a sound: a sound of crashing waves with something... shrill. It wasn't until she was on the beach did she realize it was screaming which she had heard. 

Waves crashed. The night deep, savor the blood moon overhead. Screams further. The mahogany wolf followed the source through the veil of mist and shadows and came to a little cavern along the beach. Within, the thick scent of blood and birth. Shadess didn't intrude, yet woofed lowly and leveled her head with the opening. You be alone, woman? The woman of Sapphique would never have to endure a birthing alone, lest they willed it so. They were surrounded with strength and protection of their own. Maybe this one had someone Shadess could seek?