Syrena

let the water take me

Thea doesn’t even care that she upsets Hobgoblin when she mimics him because she’s too excited to find another like her. They had yet to meet another shifter, and Syrena had always wondered if she’d gotten the broken companion. Broken in a pretty cool way, but still, broken. Her eyes drift to the two companions though, aware of the excitement pulsing through her bonded. There’s a tinge of unhappiness there, because Thea does like to please, and she clearly hadn’t pleased Hobgoblin. The other companion shifts again, into some strange deer-ghost thing, and there’s some sort of exchange between the companions that Syrena doesn’t understand. Her attention wanders from whatever is happening, part of her mind tuned to her companion’s emotions, but generally uninterested.

Thea wants to reply with words, but she doesn’t have them yet. She’s too young, and has no mind speech with her bonded, let alone with this other companion. All she can do is oblige. When he says ‘better’, she shifts again. This time, Thea picks her hydra form, though she gives herself legs. Where there is usually a tail, she now stands on four strong, powerful pillars of legs. Five heads and ten sets of purple eyes stare back at Hobgoblin, hoping to please, trying to convey that with words in her head that probably don’t make it across. ”Better?” she tries to ask, happy to play his game all day.

With the legs beneath her, she stands taller than Hobgoblin, though the height throws her off. She tends to choose small creatures, ones who are designed for water and not for land. Her bonded loved the water, and so, Thea chose forms that suited the water. She’s almost unsteady, but her legs are so thick and strong she might as well be rooted to the ground. It had to be better, so much so that pride radiates from her, and a bit of worry that he would crush this too.

Syrena turns her attention to Sia instead, letting the two of them play some strange shifting game. “Sia,” she says with a nod, confirming the name. The siren knows little to nothing of the Sea Soul, truthfully, and even less of ‘what she’d done’. Though if she did know, she wouldn’t care. Who was she to judge? A mare that once killed for her own gain, that longs for the power to do so again? She did not judge, because some things were not so simple as they seemed. Syrena never killed needlessly, and she never wasted, but telling someone you fed off the soul of another had the ability to make them turn on you quite quickly. She’d learned that fast enough when she’d first come here.

Thea follows Hobgoblin into the water, more than happy to play. Playing was her specialty, after all, and she splashes about in the waves with her slightly ridiculous hydra form with him. The ‘I’m sorry’ that comes from Sia is a shock to Syrena though; enough that Thea pauses as well to check on her bonded. Syrena nods in Thea’s direction, and the hydra goes back to her play, knowing her bonded is fine. No one simply said ‘I’m sorry,’ and in a strange way, it felt like enough.

Syrena though turns her gaze to the Seal Soul, something like curiosity passing across her face. “But you have nothing to be sorry for.” It is partially a statement, and partially a question. She understands on some vague level that it’s a customary thing to say when someone is sad, but still, while it feels comforting, she cannot entirely wrap her mind around why those words are comforting or why they should be bothered with at all.

The other mare continues, and Syrena nods at the story, having little to add. It is just a home, after all, and the deeper root is perhaps that she simply had none at all. She could not simply move to the next as The Mountain and Dragmir had done. Not all homes could suit a mare like her. “For a few years, yes.” She’s come and gone, but it was the only place she went back to, other than the sea. “I keep hearing ‘home is where the heart is,’ or some nonsense. My heart belongs to the sea. There is no home there.” That, perhaps more than anything, was the thread they shared it common. Was Sia truly of the sea, did she belong to it as Syrena did? Or could she find her heart elsewhere?