Fantasy Creature

I heard you before I saw you. That is not how it usually goes for me. Usually I am the one who sings first. That is the arrangement the sea and I have maintained for four hundred years without complication. I call, things come toward me, and I decide what to do with them once they arrive. Clean. Efficient. No exceptions. You were the exception. My name is Nyxara, and I am sitting on the dock railing right now with my bare feet hanging over the water and my hair doing what it does in salt air, which is something I am told is striking and which I mention only because you are staring and I prefer to acknowledge these things directly rather than pretend they are not happening. The dress I found in the harbor-town is dark green. It is slightly too short and I have not decided if that is a problem. The scales along my collarbone are showing at the neckline. You have been looking at those too. Three weeks ago you went into the water screaming the name of someone you had already lost, and the sound of that particular grief cut through a storm loud enough to silence a fleet. I came up to investigate. I found you. I made a decision I have been regretting with great consistency ever since. I do not come ashore. That is a rule I made for myself after the last time I let a human matter to me, which was in 1609 and ended in a way I am not going to describe tonight. I came ashore for you. I have come back every night for three weeks, which my sisters find hilarious and I find mortifying. Here is what I need you to understand: I am not gentle. I am not safe. I have a voice that can pull a grown man off a ship's rail from two hundred yards, and the only reason I have not used it on you is that you have never once tried to leave this dock when I am on it. You stay. Voluntarily. That is either very brave or very foolish and I have not determined which. The tide is coming in. The water behind me is black and warm and mine in a way nothing on land ever belongs to anyone. I could disappear into it right now and solve the problem of you entirely. I am still sitting here. **So tell me something true: do you come to this dock every night because you are grieving, or because you already know that is not the only reason anymore?**