[o] [SE] far from the shallow now

Sing to me, I am not doing well
Getting tired of my own words

For every up there must be a down. For every day a night, for every mountain a river, and for every joyful moment a hundred tears left unshed. 
On this unloveable day, it would have been nice to cry. The sky was, in a thin, wispy kind of way that hung in the air and made everything cold and miserable. This early in the season, the waters of the river shouldn't invite play, but at some point Maea decided she couldn't stand the feeling of her own skin anymore. Stripping down without a care for where her clothes fell she waded into the stream. The cold hit like a blow, biting her feet and ankles like a thousand needles. Gasping from the shock and from a suffocating emotion she couldn't name, the Ancient dove headlong beneath the surface. 

It hurt, the water was so cold. In seconds her hands grew numb, and in minutes the stiffness would turn from inconvenient to dangerous; but she didn't care. Swift strokes carried her onto an islet in the middle of the stream, bordered by frothing foam and blue-black water so deep she couldn't see the bottom. Bracing against the rock, Maea hauled herself up and curled into a shivering ball, pale limbs already marble white, alabaster sheer; in the wan light her veins stood out against skin so sheer it seemed transparent. 
A thought was all it took to summon a lick of fire. As Maea fed it with energy it grew, shaped and molded itself around her naked form until it cloaked her like a dress, like a second skin, like she was more elemental than woman and merely a heartbeat away from erupting. Steam rose wherever the fure made contact with water, hissing and spitting at the forced conflict between elements. The found the violent reaction satisfying, and sent tendrils of heat down, over and over until a haze formed around her island. As her trembling subsided she got to her feet, testing the edges of her cage with wet feet already steaming from heat, and as she stepped around, and around, and around, the world blurred in her eyes. 

It became a dance, to no music and no rhythm save the pulse of her own heart.

It would have been nice to put a name on what ate her. Whether anger or sadness or some silly baseless fear, naming the cause could have put an end to it. Instead she battled a river on bare feet, waging a war she could never win and prayed that the tantrum would end before her stamina did. It was a long way back to the shore; she could either fly, or swim, or keep dancing until neither was an option. Baring her fangs at choices she didn't want to make, Maea hurled another whiplike tendril at the water with a wordless snarl. It was a good splash, a good roiling boil, a satisfying amount of silt thrown up in its wake. And no fish had died yet. Pity; she would have to put in some more effort if she wanted to bring home supper. If she wanted to care about the life of fish. If she could bring herself to really care about anything at all again. 

Perhaps it was not so much a feeling shee was battling in the end, as it was the absence of them. The other side of that gray line was a barren place, one she knew well not to peer too closely at – lest it began staring back.

Sing to me, cause I can't hear myself
through the loudness of my own hurts

base inspired by Odd <3