Her lips were cracked. She could taste the coppery tang from the tiny splits. The wind whipped across the rocks and pebbled beach burning her cheeks as she kept walking through the crashing surf. It was not quite cold enough for freezing spray. But as the sun followed its arcing path down below the horizon the waves flung tiny pieces of ice onto the shore.
It had been weeks since she had been into town of Rhy?din and those visits did manage to make were a flurry of incoherent sentences and hours of walking through the streets. Long talks and in depth conversations with Claire about the meaning of life and the importance of buttoning the top button on your pants filled her days.
But, here in the twilight on the shores of an unknown freezing sea as the water roiled and beckoned her out into the deep it was not madness or an unseen person that spoke to her. Claire was silent on the matter. That, perhaps, is why this moment was so particularly dangerous and unusual.
There was always someone weighing on the matter in some capacity. But, there was a radio silence except for the howling of winter winds whipping across the stone jetties and the waves singing their crashing lullabies.
Cursed be the girl. Guardian of the spring
She sighed flinging her messenger bag far where the shore met the line of hardy trees that fought the sea?s wrath and won. Her fingertips were numb and so were her toes inside the rainbow galoshes. These were only thing keeping her feet relatively dry from the salt water and splinters of ice. Her dress had seen better days. The bright pink material had faded irregularly from shoulder to knee. Sun bleaching around the shoulders had left it thinned and a light pink, while the bubble skirt had lost its bubble and was streaked with mud and shredded straight through. Strands of material stuck to her knees and thighs as the wind blew against her.
Throwing her arms out wide as the waves craves around her feet she screamed into the air. It was not a high pitched, shrill shriek of excitement. It was throat ripping scream that caught on a breeze and rolled headlong into the sea.
Her mismatched eyes streaked with violet, like fireworks during the fourth of July. Flickers and flares drizzled through blue and green as the sea began to flip open like a book. Thousands of pages of flipping waves of water trip hammered against each other. It was deafening. The wind threw its weight around knocking the empty limbs of sleeping, wintered trees together. This was a calling song for the deep and fearful sea.
The waves curled into words and the wind lifted them high.
She tipped her wind chapped face to sky. The watery letters dripping against the night sky as the moon lit them up from behind.
Rydym wedi bod yn aros. The words bled into droplets and shifted again.
Eich creawdwr methu yn eich paratoi ar gyfer hyn yr ydych yn sicr o wneud. Yr oedd yn farus ac incompentant. Rydym yn sylweddoli y camgymeriad ein ffyrdd yn rhoi iddo y dasg hon.
Rekah had never seen this language before but it had been used to build her, it was intrinsically part of her. Her broken memory pieced together the words. None of it made sense, yet it all made sense at this moment.
The water washed away and spiraled up and around, hooking down into more lines.
Peidiwch ? ni ofni, gwarcheidwad. Mae'r Seithenyn meddw penderfynu ar eich cyfer. Mae hyn yn ein rhodd i gwblhau chi.
Melltigedig fod y ferch, gwarcheidwad y gwanwyn, a fu'n brwydro
cyn rhyddhau y m?r ymosododd ar .
A sudden rush of cold water and air and the sea released.
It crashed down around her ankles and calves swirling higher and higher until it lapped over and into her boots. It inched higher and higher like the rising waves of an impending hurricane. She dipped her hands into the icy sea. The water bubbled and sparked in an oppositional nature. Beads of water dotted with electrical i?s skipped along the surface as her hands pulled through the swirling surf. The magic held there skimmed along her skin like effervescent bubbles. It seeped into her pores and bled into her being. Rebuilding the construct into something else entirely, something else more potent and magical. This was an old magic. It is the thing that built the legends of Arthur and the stories of Danae, the lessons of Morrigu and the dark spells of black wizards and the whims of white enchantresses.
Hues of blue, violet, red, white, yellow, green snaked along the original binding lines of her creation and then built seams of their own. She watched in complete fascination holding her arms up and watching the synapses of colors pulse along her skin with each breath and heartbeat. She could feel the surf and the pull of the tide in her blood. The normally silent wind whispered its story into her ear. The next breath she took was filled with the crisp scent of ozone and salt. Slowly she dragged her hands from the water pulling rainbows in their wake as she did. Long backwards steps drew her away from the water?s edge as the waves themselves retreated to the normal shore line. Resetting into their normal ebb and flow, crash and pull to the whims of the moon. The winds hushed into tiny breezes.
Rekah continued to walk backwards until she stumbled over a rock caught herself on the sharp edge of a boulder scraping her hand as she did. The colors faded away and she was left shivering in the cold, her skin raw and red from exposure.
She licked her lips trying to put moisture back into them, but the wind wicked it away just as quickly as she wetted them. An owlishly blink as she turned to take stock of her surroundings.
?Where am I??
With a scraped palm and nearly frozen fingers she grabbed up her messenger bag, flipped it open and rummaged through it. An iridescent peacock feather was snatched out of the depths and used to sketch out a rudimentary door along the porous side of a nearby boulder. A doorknob drawn to complete the door and the word Rhy?din was written out. As soon as the word was completed the door popped into existence.
She grabbed onto the doorknob with a clockwise twist and pushed it open to the cobbled streets of the town. It was close to Yule. Snow was falling and dusting the rooftops and making the season merry. A smile dared to show itself after months of hiding.
With one final look over her shoulder to Land of Gwyddno, Rekah shook her head trying to recall how she got there, why and what had happened. But, it was all scattered to the corners of her mind. It was all nothing but a big blank spot in her memory. She shrugged her shoulders and licked her palm as the door slammed shut behind her and dissipated into thin air.
