The nymph was flesh and flora, ripe in her nakedness, when her body felt the tug of a current. Her birthing pod, the great and flush fruit that had beat slowly like a world heart, shivered. It was another life undone to produce hers, in a way, and so she experienced her first death in the early moments of her singular life. The thick, wet peel curled away from the edges left by Kedrick's blade. The flow of her nutrient-bearing broth leaked first as a trickle, then as a more eager fall, until she was carried gently toward the slit that would lead her into the greater world. The fluid whirled and pooled over Kedrick’s feet and met him in prelude to her inelegant arrival. It was an invasion, that blade into her solitude, and the nymph was thusly drawn to meet it.<br/><br/>She slipped through the opening when the rushing outpour of her ripe pod was at its most urgent. A slide of artistic limbs as she splashed onto the stone with a dull thud. The moments were long before her first breath, the only sound in the room was the echoing whorl and splashing of the enormous and shriveling fruit. Her inglorious exit had thrown the pinkish fluid up to Kedrick’s chest, leaving his suit slick with her sustenance. The nymph that had dropped from the pod was a remarkable work of modern mysticism. She was curled, encased in a dewy membrane that seemed hungry to soak in the rosy fluid. And she was deathly still. At once, it was apparent she was painfully straddled a human and inhuman existence. A nymph was simply a pretty name for a magic-made thing, a shell with a borrowed spark. Lying there, she might have been a soil-fed doll, but the rust-tinged spill and her membranous chrysalis begged that the fruit had been a mother. A soul, given to that room, that had been priced as a seed.<br/><br/>It was only when the fruit’s offerings had dwindled to a slow trickle, now a wasted husk on the arching stems, that the creature gasped and stretched. The membrane flexed and then burst, melting over her to leave her nude form glistening in an organically prismatic sheen. Skin that belonged in a love affair with the sunlight, a faintly toasted gold, spanning shapes that were intensely human. She looked soft, like petals, with vines crawling beneath to carry his blood. Branches, which married flesh and bark, spired out from her forehead like a wild thing’s antlers and tangled with hair the color of forest moss. She was peaceful in her naked slumber, vulnerable at the feet of the man that had deemed she exist.<br/><br/>When she did open her eyes, they were inhumanly large and black as midnight. She stared up at him, her strands flowing in the inches of her incubating bath to caress her skin and snake patterns over her bare rounds. Her pink lips parted when she saw him, an expression like she was witnessing the divine, and then she spoke. “Do I have a name, Master, or shall I speak one?” she breathed into the quiet. Her voice was something nostalgic, familiar to his soul if his mind could not place it, and the mouth that spoke it, too.<br/><br/>She moved, rolling to push herself onto her knees and staring up at him from that pose.