Liars (Lake Baikal | Siberia)

[Thalia]

The disbelief made Thalia laugh pleasantly, though she only shrugged and nodded. Despite the casual way she’d pointed it out, it was the first time she’d seen it shimmering around another, as strangely mesmerising as that fluttering sense of kinship.

Kemala seemed both shy of and strengthened by the compliment, which Thalia took to mean that the tattoos themselves had personal significance. The woman was too beautiful to be unaccustomed to comments on her appearance. “I am. Paintings, mostly. Though I’ve designed tattoos before too.” One such in fact inked great swathes of her own back, something of an exorcism at the time, and so placed in order that it might easily be forgotten. Even now, her life unrecognisable from the time of its conception, she did not think easily of those hazy memories.

The other had been Rune’s, which equally did not bear thinking about.

Her gaze pinched quiet at mention of the tsunami, Noctua’s words echoing back the warning he had seen in the dream the day prior to the devastation. For the first time she considered whether he might have made a difference, and it prickled cool against her skin. Her lips parted as though to speak, but paused, her brows knit soft. Moscow was a beautiful city, but she did not miss it. Aylin was as close to home as she had, and she could not imagine the pain of losing that connection. She would not want a stranger’s pity for it.

“Change,” she repeated instead, and nodded. She glanced at her hand, wrapped now in a second-skin bandage that gloved her palm all but invisible. It was more extravagance than she’d normally indulge, but protected the healing wound from the water. The numbing agents even soothed the pain to something insignificant. In looking at it she realised then that the Pope had travelled great distance in order to warn her against submerging herself beyond her depth, yet had done nothing knowing thousands were about to die. Acceptance of futility? Yet why when she thought of the creature Tuuru and the other strange drawings siphoned out that night in Eha’s cottage, did her heart beat so?

“And the deepest,” she agreed, then paused at a strange sense of deja vu. Her gaze blinked out across the water, though she did not stay quietly contemplative for long. “The locals call it the Sacred Sea, did you know that? I’ve read lots of strange things about this place.”

Her head tilted, and she smiled. “I don’t truly know. My life took an odd turning of late, and I’m just moving along with it. There’s a french word for it. Dérive. Drifting until you find the right path.” Her nose scrunched, and she laughed a little at how it sounded, though not apologetically. “I came to see if something’s real,” she added, then paused for a moment's reflection; like it was the first time she had truly articulated her reasons for being here. “No. I know it’s real. I came to see it with my own eyes. If I can even find it.” She didn’t speak of the feelings knotted up in her chest, or that the sketch balanced on her bare knee was precisely what she was talking about, though she did glance at it before her attention stole back out.

After a moment longer, she flopped back to lay unceremoniously in the sand, hands resting on her stomach. "What will you seek here to take with you?"