HELL IS IN HELLO

[RED]

Ottilie's legs are laced with pink sand up to the knees, crusted, rosy shards of shell and rock held to her skin by salt water and the warm coastal wind; she doesn't bother to shake it off. It's kind of fascinating, really. For a girl like her, trapped inland by a home in the middle of nowhere, the sight of an ocean extending to the horizon is enough to send a thrill up her spine, but sand? Pink sand? That's what a princess deserves. Her hair is tangled in knots of salt and hair, her curls more pronounced by the sea air, fur ruffled and gaze narrowed by the wind, but she is absolutely exhilarated. The sun is shining today with the heat of mid-morning, and she's completely satisfied by where her wanderings have taken her today; the weeks she's spent exploring this new land so far has been informative, but not always glamorous. Plenty of what she's traversed have been swamps or miles of empty grassland without a tree for miles, not at all the kind of landscape Ottie feels particularly comfortable in. But this? This is beautiful. And Ottie is allowing herself to smile about it.

She heaves in a deep breath and looks around. There's no one else around, just stretching miles of water and the frosty white rocks that line the cove, one of which she's standing on. It's surprisingly still and peaceful, more than anywhere else she can remember. Experimentally, she dips a leg back into the milky-pink water; it's cold, a welcome relief to the sun that's been beating down on her back, not only today, but for weeks. The sand at the bottom is grainy and rough, and Ottilie tries to be careful about stepping on whatever organisms are living on the bottom, ridged mollusk shells and the brightly colored tropical fish that dart away from wherever her strides hit. They're not exactly fearless, but that's their problem. Ottie isn't scared of anything - never has been, never will be. (Both a fault and a virtue.) Not even of giants, the way she looks to these fish, wiggling around in the rosy waters.  She carefully picks her way further into the water so that all four legs are submerged and drops her head to graze the surface of the water, where everything is masked by the pink except for flashes of dark fish as they move around her. 



kota <3 for invidia