That’s when the world changed. Irrevocably.
The banded sleeve that marched up his arm and spread over his shoulder. The fire tattoo with my name imprinted at its heart. All of Daniel’s tattoos began to burn, to light up with eerie blue glow.
“Daniel?” The urgency of my voice had him raising his head to look at me questioningly.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
As he straightened up, I caught my breath, eyes widened as I stared at his body. All his tattoos, all of them were glowing with the same blue fire. Through the rippling water I could clearly see the markings of his pe’a, even the patterns on his lower leg, shimmering with iridescent blue. “Your tattoos, what’s happening to them?”
He held up his arms and looked at them in astonishment. “I don’t know.”
As we both stared wide-eyed, the water around us began to bubble and swirl as if a mini tornado was building up. Fear caught at me as it always did when I was in water, away from my power source. The earth that gave me fearlessness and unbridled power. “Let’s get out of here.” I slipped off the rock shelf, into the water, stumbling over rocks as I moved towards the poolside, to the safety of the rocks beside it. But he didn’t follow me. Instead he stood there in the center of the pool, raising his hands in wonder, regarding his glowing blue markings. I spoke his name sharply, but it was as if he did not hear me. “Daniel!”
The pool was now a raging broiling mass of white as the water churned and in its heart, stood Daniel. He smiled. But not at me. At the water around him. As tendrils of liquid began to rise from the churning surface, snaking its way around his body, along his outstretched arms, silver ribbons of mercury. Ripples of glass. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The pool heaved with some unseen force and the water lifted like a platform of white surf, lifting Daniel with it so that he stood a few meters off the surface.
I screamed his name and this time he turned his head to look at me. But it wasn’t Daniel. Not the Daniel I knew. Not the Daniel I loved. His eyes glowed with the same blue light as that which highlighted his every tattoo and ropes of water were coiled around his arm. The arms that had held me, carried me. He raised the hands that had caressed me, that had traced the outline of my face with love and shook them, as if trying to loosen the ropes. They responded to his motions and from that slight impatient shake of his hands, a whip-like wire of pure water, lashed the surface of the pool, reaching to the earth on which I stood, lashing it with deadly force, ripping up rocks and plants as it scythed along the ground only inches from where I stood. I was too stunned to move and shattered fragments of rock, sprayed against my face. If there was pain , I didn’t feel it. I just stood and stared at the one I loved.
Telesa vasa loloa.