Chapter Text
The world is blue and green and dappled with shifting sunlight, the warm current pushing her deep and then buoying her up to the surface like a leaf in the wind.
She is in and of the water, and she is as new and fresh as the day she took her first breath. She is tumbling, flipping head over heels, and the unshakeable stream of time is breaking against her like she is a stone, unaware and uncaring of the feeling of it trickling harmlessly around her smooth granite sides.
Her sisters dart past her now and again in varied shades of rainwater green and blue, their laughter tinkling like wind chimes, like the rustling of young green cattails in the breeze. They are gathered in a school, dragging a pale, squirming creature deep into the soft carpet of silt and gnarled tuber roots that forms the riverbed. She laughs with them, waving a giddy farewell to the thing as it disappears into the murk. The stream of bubbles it leaves behind floats gently to the surface, each delicate echo of breath popping soundlessly as it travels from water to air; the last traces of a fleeting mortal life.
Later, or perhaps now, she will find a pair of ankles to wrap her webbed fingers around, or she will swim to the surface and sing, or she will follow the salmon as they struggle, wriggling, upstream. Or she will do nothing at all but lay on the soft, squelching ground and watch the water-skimmers glide over swirling patterns of sunlight up above. It is all the same to her, grasping always for honeysuckle-sweet amusement, both momentary and momentous, gone in a blink and yet as continuous as she.
The pine-needle naiad thinks of very little, and notices even less, and laughs her bellsong laugh anew at the same delights she has chased and been chased by for centuries. Or perhaps only a minute or two. Time is neither friend nor foe to her kind; it is barely even a whisper, as insignificant as the beating of a mortal heart.
This is all life is, and this is all that life will ever be, and she has never given this any thought at all, as she does with most things.
At least, she hadn't. Until the boy came.
-
Some fool or other had built a bridge over her river, many decades ago. It is an arcing wooden thing, the color long-since stolen by the greedy fingers of the sun, with rusting silver holding it together at its seams.
He, the aforementioned fool, had only been spared long enough to finish it because her sisters found it more entertaining to watch him build than to watch him drown. He had been lovely, that builder, though she cannot recall much of him aside from the fact he had been dark and broad like a great maple tree. She does not remember many mortals clearly enough to summon their faces, though this does not bother her.
His memory is kept in other ways, ways more suited to her kind and their yearning for mischief. His skeleton still rests beneath the bridge he built, yellowed with time and slick with algae, worn smooth like a river-stone by the current and half-buried in swirling silt. His beauty did not save him in the end.
There is a new man on this bridge now, or rather a boy, she thinks. She knows little of the ways mortals measure their odd tendency to grow, but he is scrawny and has no beard, unlike most of the mortal men her sisters lure so easily into the river. A boy, then.
A foolish one, too, it seems, much like the builder of the bridge he is currently dangling headfirst off of, long golden hair falling in a feathery sheet to cup his jaw.
He seems to be peering down at her, she notices with something like surprise, his eyes trained on where her own hair, dark like tree-bark where his is light, billows up in a cloud and sways with the gentle tug of the current. She blinks up at him from where she is nestled amongst the reeds, letting them tickle her sides as she watches the occasional bottom-feeder glide past. It isn’t often that mortals look long enough into the murk to take notice of her kind. He must know what to look for. Strange boy.
She narrows her eyes at him, and his rippling face is overtaken by an odd expression- surprise, perhaps? Delight? And then, he lifts a golden dangling hand to… wave at her. Strange, but foolish, now she is certain. Oh, well. She has a great love for fools.
Not one to waste on opportunity that is handed to her so generously, she winds up and bunches her muscles, curling her legs beneath her like the poised arm of a mantis waiting to strike, and pushes up from the soft mud, launching herself toward the surface as if she were a falcon and the water merely wind whistling in her ears.
She is thin and slippery as an eel, and the river parts before her like she is a blade. As shimmering sunlight flashes before her, reflected on the fracturing surface of the water like the many faces of a crystal, robbing her of her eyes, she reaches up, up, and up. Elation curls warm and bubbling and familiar in her stomach as her fingers splay to clasp like a vice around that golden arm, victory almost in hand.
But, as she breaks the surface, a gasp of blood-warm air pulled greedily into lungs that burn like a newborn calve's, her fingers snap closed around stark nothingness.
The boy has withdrawn, quick like the snap of a whip, and sits now cross-legged and safe behind the wooden railing. She hisses her frustration into the air that chafes as it slides down her throat, the sharp sound between her needle-teeth morphing into a gurgle as she sinks back into the river to flare her gills and take in oxygen that feels much less dead.
The boy is grinning down at her, toothy and shit-eating and far too smug for someone who was dangling himself like a worm wriggling on a hook before her mere moments ago. Or perhaps it has been years. Stupid boy, stupid bridge.
She kicks up a long, evergreen leg, sending an arc of water up to knock that grin off his golden face as she whirls and darts back down into the river.
The sound of rumbling, cracking laughter ripples through the water as she retreats, defeated for now, so different from the tinkling of wind chimes.