You lie there, Master. Your head gently resting on a silken pillow. Your hair crowning your delicate features, like a halo placed tenderly upon the golden head of a heavenly angel. Your flimsy eyelids flicker as you dream. Your breathing is slow and monotonous and heavy. Your chest rises and drops, steadily, like the rhythmic beat of the waves slapping on the shore outside your tinted window. The shore where you found her. Once upon a time.

Naked. Sprawled across the sand. Her skin as white as snow, her hair as black as ebony, her lips as red as blood. Her arms are twisted. Her legs are dangling lifeless, seaweed entwined through her toes and twisted up her thigh. Touch her. Go forth and slowly graze your fingers upon her neck. Clear the tangled web of matted hair from her pixie face. You move it, delicately. Her skin is so soft. Soft – as if stored eternally in a vase of tender rose petals where no harm could ever come to it. Her thin lips are transfixed into an O, her chiselled brow moulded into a frown – as if in pain. Suffocation maybe. Yet her skin, her fragile, pliant skin, is warm to touch and her cheeks still radiant.

She stirred, her brow knitted, her eyes opened – bright luminous green eyes that stared into yours as you flinched, almost as if by looking into you, you had become mesmerised by her eerie, uncomfortable, black, red, white beauty. You touched her breast soothingly and she touched yours. Through your velvet dressing gown you could feel her childlike fingers slowly caress your nipple. She stretched her head forward and planted her lips upon yours and you accepted, pushing your tongue into hers; a hand moving downwards, into her body, the other fingering her tangled salty hair. Your kingdom lay behind you. All worries were forgotten in this moment of extreme desire as you lay in her arms and she lay in yours – caressing each other, gently making love. And you slept. And she slept. And you both slept together. Both dreaming, both singing, both entwined, both peaceful.

An overhead swallow wakes you suddenly from your slumber. The sun is slowly disappearing into the underworld as you stand, looking around you. She is nowhere to be seen. There is not a single trace that she has even existed, yet all around you is music – a song is being played: a soft melodious song that the wind makes when whistling through the trees. The song tells of an underwater beauty that will be cursed to live the life, only for a moment, as a two legged fiend: stapled to the land, unable to move, paralysed – for how were you to use these tentacles? Merely the kiss form a fellow beast will rid her of the malice of this curse – to you she is eternally grateful. For you had not only kissed her but given her a gift and at the same time, accepted her gift: her virginal purity.

The song sings on. Eternally. It has not quavered, nor has it strengthened. It is more than a fragment of a spring delusion. It remains steady. As does the world spinning on its axis, as does the waves’ crashing on the shore, as does the steady rise and drop of your chest as you so placidly sleep, lying there on your silken pillow, your hair crowning your delicate features like a halo placed tenderly on the golden head of a heavenly angel.