Dahlia The Drowned - Tumblr Posts
This is a continuation of this post.
They take her old name from her. She loses her legs, she loses her home, and now she’s lost her name. Dahlia, they call her. Dahlia, after the ship she was thrown from. Because until the deed is complete, she must have a reminder. As if the tail where she her legs used to be wasn’t enough.
The one who saved her (Dahlia says this, her savior says she was simply there to greet her) is named Cora. She’s completed her deed, renamed herself. It isn’t her original name, Cora can’t remember what that was, but it’s one she likes. She tells Dahlia one night, deep inside the bright colored coral reef she lives in most of the time, that it was the name of a woman with two legs who always cried when she saw her. She can’t remember why the woman cried.
Cora scares Dahlia a little. She doesn’t want to forget. She doesn’t want to lose everything till the only thing she has left is a tail, her voice, and Dahlia.
They say she’ll get her revenge. She wonders how. All of the men are on land now. They won’t sail for some time. Only one comes towards the ocean now but he was a cabin boy. He didn’t want to do it. He was only a child really, a little colt only just learning how to run. He had no voice when they threw her to the depths.
He sees her sometimes. Cora’s reef is by her old home, where the ship was sailing. She goes to its highest parts and watches her old home from them sometimes. He sees her when she sits there because he comes late at night when she can, when no one with good sense would go to the beach. He isn’t surprised by her, nor is he scared. He knew the stories too.
Got a lot of positive feedback so here’s more!
The cabin boy’s name is Angelo. He told her it one night, while he sat on the beach, knees tucked beneath his chin, and she stared at him from her reef. He could barely see her but he didn’t seem to mind. He told her his name in a quiet broken voice, saying he wasn’t sure if she knew it before. He apologizes. He should have spoken up. He should have stopped them.
She didn’t know his name. She hadn’t even spoken to him. He’d just been a cabin boy.
He should have spoken up. He should have stopped them.
He starts coming every night after that. Dahlia can’t tell if it’s some sort of penance or if he just can’t help himself but she doesn’t care. She wishes he’d go away.
One night he mentions her grandmother and she bursts out of the water, rushing him. He’s too far for her to reach without leaving the water at least partially but it still makes him jump as she suddenly becomes closer. He doesn’t make a sound though. It’s like he doesn’t care if she drags him into the dark.
But she doesn’t. She doesn’t even try to touch him. She just stares at him, once normal blue eyes now luminous in the night and entrancing. He seems to get it after a minute and starts to tell her about her grandmother more. He promises to start visiting her so she’s not alone and he follows through.
She gets comfortable with him. She doesn’t mean to but she does. Now when he comes, she’s out of the water, sitting on rocks near the shore. Still in deeper water though, still where she can easily slip back beneath the water. He stands closer to the water now, sea almost lapping at his feet. He tells her about her grandmother, about the village, about “adventures” he’s been on.
He mentions the other men. Sometimes he doesn’t mean to and he apologizes over and over again when he sees her flinch or her entire being bristle with fury. Other times, it’s on purpose. He can see the need for vengeance in her eyes. He understands though she can see the sadness in his own.
This is a continuation of this post.
They take her old name from her. She loses her legs, she loses her home, and now she’s lost her name. Dahlia, they call her. Dahlia, after the ship she was thrown from. Because until the deed is complete, she must have a reminder. As if the tail where she her legs used to be wasn’t enough.
The one who saved her (Dahlia says this, her savior says she was simply there to greet her) is named Cora. She’s completed her deed, renamed herself. It isn’t her original name, Cora can’t remember what that was, but it’s one she likes. She tells Dahlia one night, deep inside the bright colored coral reef she lives in most of the time, that it was the name of a woman with two legs who always cried when she saw her. She can’t remember why the woman cried.
Cora scares Dahlia a little. She doesn’t want to forget. She doesn’t want to lose everything till the only thing she has left is a tail, her voice, and Dahlia.
They say she’ll get her revenge. She wonders how. All of the men are on land now. They won’t sail for some time. Only one comes towards the ocean now but he was a cabin boy. He didn’t want to do it. He was only a child really, a little colt only just learning how to run. He had no voice when they threw her to the depths.
He sees her sometimes. Cora’s reef is by her old home, where the ship was sailing. She goes to its highest parts and watches her old home from them sometimes. He sees her when she sits there because he comes late at night when she can, when no one with good sense would go to the beach. He isn’t surprised by her, nor is he scared. He knew the stories too.
More Dahlia the Drowned. I’m gonna try to put up at least one every day!
They’d called her grandfather foolish when he’d built her grandmother a house so close to the shore. Even those who didn’t believe the old wives’ tales. It was just common knowledge, bad things came to those who lived so close to the water. But that’s what her grandmother had wanted and her grandfather had loved her enough to do it.
They say he fell into the sea one night, his body swept away. Now, Dahlia wonders if it’s true. But she doesn’t ask Cora.
She’s afraid of the answer she’d get.
She worried about her grandmother.
She knew Angelo was keeping good care of her but it didn’t always help. She wanted to take care of her grandmother herself. She’d done it all her life, it was hard to let go. She knew her grandmother better than Angelo anyways! She knew how her knees hurt more in the mornings than the night. She knew how the cold made her arms ache. She knew that good soup could cure anything physical but properly cooked fish could cure everything else.
She wanted to take care of her grandmother.
Dahlia stared at her home. And stared. And stared.
How long would it take her to drag herself to its door? How long would she be able to stay there just touching the wood, soaking in the feeling? Did she have to always be near the water? Could she really not go farther than the shore? Couldn’t she just sit and talk to her grandmother for a moment, just a moment?
“You will have to let go of that world one day, Dahlia. It will be more painful if you keep trying to be apart of it.”
“How do you know?”
Cora stared at her sadly, eyes darkening because they couldn’t produce tears anymore. “Because I’ve known others like you. And I’ve seen their bodies decay and turn to shells when they tried to stay too long on land.”
Dahlia kept staring. Cora started gnawing on coral to relieve stress.
“Don’t tell me the dangers of the ocean, young man.” She recognized her grandmother’s voice immediately. Dahlia let out a gasp, one that sounded like a note in a song, and quickly slipped into one of the shadows cast by the rocks surrounding her. She could slip beneath the water, go through the tunnel that would lead back to deeper waters and the reef, but she didn’t. She hid herself but she couldn’t bring herself to disappear completely. Just one glimpse. That’s all she wanted. Just one glimpse.
“I know Missus Eliza. You’ve lived here your whole life.” Angelo’s voice reached her. He sounded a little exasperated, as if he’d had this conversation a hundred times. Knowing her grandmother, he probably had. But he also sounded a little concerned too. Dahlia thought she understood why.
“Yes I have! So shush, young man!”
“It’s Angelo, Missus Eliza.”
“Angelo. Gavin. Theodore. Whatever your name is, shush.” Dahlia barely stopped a laugh from escaping her. Her grandmother used to do the same thing to her.
Angelo was a smart boy, he fell silent. Her grandmother started talking about her grandfather, probably not even paying attention to see if Angelo cared. She’d probably say it didn’t matter if Dahlia asked. Of course, if Dahlia asked she’d probably scream. Or leap into the water and die. Did her voice work on relatives? Was she just afraid to find out?
A rock suddenly dropped into the pool and Dahlia dove for the tunnel. Above her, she swore she saw a flash of white hair. But she didn’t look back to see if her grandmother had noticed her, not even when she got to deep water. She returned to the reef and hid herself among it, away from white hair and Cora’s knowing eyes.
The answer was clear. She was afraid.
Dahlia the Drowned: Angelo’s Involvement.
Joining the crew of the Dahlia hadn’t been his decision, it’d been his cousin’s. Gabriel had been talking for years about joining a crew and traveling the world but Angelo had never thought he’d actually do it. But Gabriel had proved him wrong and he’d sort of just gone along with it when his cousin had told him he was coming with him. He hadn’t minded it...Not too much anyways. The old stories bothered him as he first set foot on deck but his worry was quickly pushed aside when Gabriel grabbed him by the shoulders and steered him below deck, grinning the whole time and talking excitedly about their new life.
His mother had raised them. Gabriel had lost both his parents to the sea and Angelo had lost his father the same way. So his mother had raised them. A sailor’s widow, filled with stories collected from her husband and the docks. She’d told him the old stories. She’d told him about what happened to women who ended up thrown overboard by the crews they traveled with. He’d listened. Gabriel hadn’t.
There was a woman on board the Dahlia. He found out the day after they set sail. He saw her walking with the captain, smiling and laughing at something he’d said. He was surprised. Most of the men were superstitious (when men tell that many ghost stories, they either believed them or were trying to scare the newbies), he couldn’t believe they’d agreed to sail with her. But he supposed some men just wouldn’t go against their captain, no matter how superstitious they were.
Sometimes he could see fish swim just beneath the surface of the water below. He liked to stare at them, watch their fins occasionally rise out of the dark. Once, late at night when he couldn’t sleep, he thought he saw eyes peering up at him from the dark but he couldn’t be sure. He was probably just tired. And if he wasn’t...
Angelo avoided the edge of the ship for a few days.
About a week after setting out, bad luck started coming their way. That’s when the men started whispering about the woman. They treated her like some sort of monster, never saying her name and avoiding her as much as possible. Their captain scolded them when he heard the whispers, calling them empty headed crones for believing such nonsense. The whispering stopped.
And then the captain died, a storm appeared on the horizon, and one of the sailors reported that rats had gotten into the food.
They decided to throw the woman overboard.
She’d smiled at him a few times. Nodded to him. They’d never spoken though, not once. He didn’t even know her name. He doubted she knew his.
He didn’t say anything when they dragged her from the room the captain had given her. He didn’t say anything when they tied her to the cannon ball. He didn’t say anything when she begged them not to do this. Begged them to let her live. Begged them because no. No please. My grandmother, I’m all she has. My-My father! His bracelet! He died in that town back there, I have to bring it to her! Please! Please!
He didn’t say anything when they threw her overboard. He didn’t try to stop them.
The ship’s badly damaged by the storm. Some of the men say it would have been worse with that woman aboard. Angelo keeps quiet when they say it but as they near the shore he asks after the bracelet their new captain keeps in his pocket, the woman’s father’s bracelet. He assures him he’ll give it to her grandmother and he does so the day they get to the town.
Angelo doesn’t go with him. He can’t bring himself to face her.
He finds himself by the grandmother’s house one night. He hasn’t slept well since they got back on land. Gabriel says he got used to the ship rocking him to sleep. He thinks it’s because he hears the woman’s pleads in his ears whenever he closes his eyes.
He finds himself by the grandmother’s house one night. And he looks to the water, so close and so dark and so consuming. Two bright blue eyes stare back at him, the only truly distinguishable things in the dark. He knows those blue eyes, they met his for a moment before they disappeared over the edge of the ship. He isn’t surprised. He isn’t scared. He comes back every night, starts to talk to her, tells her he’ll take care of her grandmother though she never talks back. He comes to like her. She’s playful. Kind. She likes his stories.
He didn’t say anything when they threw her overboard. He didn’t try to stop them.
A Dahlia and Angelo short.
She doesn’t talk. He talks too much.
It works out pretty well, surprisingly.
Talking has always come easily to Angelo. He’s never shied away from conversations, always having something to say or a story to tell. Gabriel’s told him for years that he talks too much but Angelo doesn’t mind. He usually doesn’t listen either. He likes talking and most people don’t seem to mind so why should he stop?
She never seems to mind. (She’s always just she or her in his mind, even though he knows her name. It just doesn’t fit anymore and whenever he almost says it she gets uncomfortable, as if it’s the wrong thing to say.) In fact, she seems to prefer it. He can tell on the days when he’s quieter than usual, just enjoying the night air and skipping small rocks he finds along the water, that the silence bothers her. Her tail flicks like a cat’s if she’s sitting still and if she’s in the water she moves a lot, swimming back and forth restlessly.
He’s not wrong either. Dahlia hates the quiet now. Before, she hadn’t minded it so much. She’d preferred the quiet while she worked and she’d always preferred listening to the ocean with someone over actually talking to them. But now, with the voices of her “sisters” so foreign and the world beneath the water so quiet compared to the one on the surface, the quiet kills her.
Angelo is what keeps her from going insane. She can’t speak to him, she’s afraid that even without intent her voice will affect him, but she doesn’t mind so long as he keeps talking. He’s a born storyteller, entertaining and interesting. He makes her laugh and smile and his company eases the pain she gets in her chest every time she looks to home.
She knows one day he’ll stop talking. One day he’ll give up on telling her stories, give up on spending time with the silent murderous creature from the ocean, and never come back. But she doesn’t think about that. Won’t think about that.
He talks too much. She doesn’t talk at all.
It works for them.
A little focus on Cora from my Dahlia series.
There’d been others before Dahlia, others she’d been there for during their transformation and had come back to her reef with her. Four of them to be exact, each of whom she’d followed from the harbor when she’d spotted them boarding a ship. Janus, Linnet, Berwick, Medee.
Janus had been the first. She’d lasted a while, completed her task, before she left Dahlia. She carved out a home for herself in a deep set of caves near a pirates’ port and was now doing what Cora did, helping their newly turned sisters find their way, complete their tasks.
Linnet had been second and had only spent a short while with Cora before slipping away in the dead of night. She’d been blinded by fury, killing all of the men responsible for her death within her first month, never stopping to give herself time to adjust. Before she left, Cora had seen her changing, teeth becoming sharper and fingernails turning to claws. She wasn’t sure what happened to Linnet after she slipped away but sometimes she heard stories that made her think Linnet was involved.
Berwick was third. Medee was last. Cora represses her memories of them. She remembers their fates, turned to shells before her eyes because they wanted to stay on land, but she refuses to remember anything else. Just like with her namesake. Just like with all of her life from before.
She tells Dahlia about the original Cora. She’s a woman she took her name from, a woman who cried every time she saw her.
She tells Dahlia about Berwick and Medee. She’s seen others turn to shells doing what she fears Dahlia is doing.
Cora sees questions in Dahlia’s eyes. Why can Cora have a name from a woman with two legs but she has to give up that world? How does Cora know what will happen if she stays on land too long? How long will it take me to forget like her?
Cora hopes Dahlia will never ask her any of her questions. She’s suppressed her memories for so long, it might just kill her to remember again.
Aaaaaand...I’m back! This one isn’t as good but at least I’m writing again! If anyone has any prompt ideas, go ahead and send them to me! I need to keep busy.
So I’m circling back to the sirens are drowned women idea. My original contribution here. Some more of it, I’m definitely changing stuff, here.
***
Dahlia was sailing again. Six long months after her rebirth. Six short months after her death. The Dahlia was sailing again.
She circled beneath it, staying hidden by its shadow so the sailors would not see her as they brought their supplies onboard. She could not see their faces but she heard their voices, bright and joyful with a spark of excitement over a new adventure on the water. Someone was singing and Dahlia closed her eyes at the melodious sound, a tremor starting at her head and passing down through her fins. Clearer than a still pool, the memory of that voice shouting for her hands to be tied.
Cora watched her from below, laying in the sand. She had a lobster trap in her hands and she was thoughtlessly destroying it. The lobster had long since escaped and yet she kept pulling. Breaking. Breaking. Breaking. Dahlia flinched at each snap.
Above, the singing grew louder as two others joined in. Dahlia threw up her hands and covered her ears but it did nothing to block out the noise. She wanted to scream. Wanted to cry. But tears had been stolen from her and a scream would bring all of them beneath the water. They would kill her and Cora the moment they saw them. Or Cora and Dahlia would have to kill them.
Dahlia sunk down to the sea floor, slowly letting her hands fall away from her ears. Fury boiled beneath her skin. Bloodlust coated her tongue like a savory glaze. Disgust churned in her stomach and she closed her eyes again as the feeling of being on that ship took over.
A part of her wondered if Angelo would be on the ship when they set sail.
A part of her didn't care.
More siren related stuff. Focus on Angelo. Not super fleshed out and it’s kind of softly exploring a new character I’m working with.
***
“You’re gonna bring them down on us. The way you keep looking.” Joanne declared.
Angelo pulled away from the side of the ship as quickly as possible. He winced, casting the woman a guilty look. Two of the other sailors nearby laughed at him and he could feel his skin heat up. “Sorry.” He ducked his head, avoided her eyes.
She took pity on him. “It’s alright. Some of ours have been doing it too. We’re lucky though, our captain is keeping us calm.” She looked up at the helm, at the woman looking out at all of them with those steel eyes. Angelo didn't like those eyes. They seemed to see straight into his heart, read his memories. “She’s assured us all that the sea-damned don’t attack ships like ours. All women.” Joanne said it as fact, without even a tiny doubt in her voice.
“Even with us here? Even with...” Angelo cut himself off. He knew they all knew what must have happened but he didn't want to say it out loud. Make it real.
“Well, that’s what she’s saying. I think it’s true. Never hear about it. I’d never even seen one before until we found all of you.”
“But none of you are men. You wouldn’t do what we did.”
Here, Joanne paused. She bit her lip and moved forward, coming up beside him against the rail. She looked out at the horizon and saw something else. “My father used to say I was. Maybe, if I’d stayed to live the life he wanted me to, I would have been the sort to do what your crew did.” She shrugged. The other sailors nearby had moved off when she mentioned her father, giving respectful nods in their direction before going. Not leaving because they were uncomfortable, leaving out of a respect for privacy. “Doesn’t matter but.” Joanne sighed and looked back at him. Her gaze was still a little far away but she was seeing him. “The sea-damned are only known to attack those who deserve it. They don’t risk killing innocent people.”
He couldn’t help protesting. “That you know of.”
He was testing her patience. She grabbed his shoulder, spun him, and pushed him towards the hatch. “That I know of.” She repeated sharply.