I

t is the cusp of winter and the coming of it sharpens Amaroq like a knife.

No longer must he keep to the depths to stay cool throughout the sluggish summer heat; no longer must he wait until night, when the temperature dips enough for him to stray onto paths like a wandering moon. Soon the world might be his, and it is well it is so, for in winter his blood begs him to create.

He is no stranger to loneliness, but as frost coats the grass in the morning and the birds migrate south and the moon hangs in a ring of ice it his need to Make grows stronger than hunger. More and more often he ranges up into Denocte, heedless of the chaos of the country, searching for something more than prey.

But he finds something else altogether in the temple in the mountains.

Amaroq had seen it in glimpses from the sea, far below; moments when it gleamed like a mirror against the setting sun. Never had he come near enough, but when cool dawn broke over the waters he stepped from his beach and into the underbrush, and climbed up and up along the cliffs, until he stood below those ivy-hung arches.

Surely this, too, belonged to the unicorn with the city on the hill.

The kelpie keeps no gods but the moon and the ocean and his own sharp teeth, and so he steps beneath those curving doorways without hesitation. He does not count the time he spends wandering, in cool dim of the temple where the air tastes like cold dust and ancient salt, but it is long enough that he forgets everything but a low kind of wonder until he hears the feet of another, coming up the path.

The unicorn stills, turns his pale eyes to the colorful world beyond gold and marble and shadow. So quiet is he that even the stallion’s whisper carries to him, a scarlet leaf caught on a breeze.

“Have you no guess?” he says, voice low and cold, and steps forward from the shadows with his hooves echoing on the marble as they might on windswept ice.

F

or just a moment he imagines what it might be like, to be worshipped.

Amaroq has seen wonder and awe in the eyes of his prey, the ones he has turned and the ones not made to be hunters, only dead. If being a god is being feared then the kelpie has been holy, though now he is nothing more than a winter-lean ghost.

But he and his kind have been hunted in turn, and what gods are pursued and killed by their worshippers?

He breathes in sea-salt, he breathes out a stream of mist. Ice rimes the soft spirals of his horn and reaches out from where he stands, coating the tile and marble in frost. The unicorn’s pale eyes pass from the chestnut stallion to the orb that hangs behind him like a full moon and Amaroq’s gaze softens into curiosity. Now he leans back, now his tail lays like silk instead of twitching like a cat’s.

Caligo, the man says, and the name snares in his memory. He has heard it mentioned in the few times he’s neared the chaos of the city, but the only image he summons with it is that of a unicorn, a queen, with a brush of scales on her belly and a dragon by her side. My city, she’d said, though he knows she was not a god. At last he looks away from that small, strange moon and back to the stallion it follows.

“No one has been worshipped here for some time.” There are footprints in the dust of the temple but they all belong to him; the only scents of living things are birds and mice. If there are worshippers still then they are ghosts.

Amaroq tilts his head as he considers the stranger, and his horn of bone drops toward him like the point of a sword. It is not quite a threat; he is still more curious than he is hungry or vengeful or mad. “Perhaps I will be its god now,” he says, and smiles thinly, like autumn’s first frost.

I

t interests him, the way this stallion is so content to watch the world bustling far below, distant and inconsequential, and not the creature who just declared himself god.

Not that he is vain - or at least, not terribly. Not any more than a lion in its prime whose mane is full and claws are sharp and eyes are terribly bright. But it is strange, for Amaroq, to be so near a man so seemingly indifferent to his sharp teeth and the way his horn points like an accusation or a question.

But his words make the keplie smile, and settle back, and soften his gaze to something more curious than hungry. “As good a guess as your one for the use of this place,” he says, and at last draws out from the shadows to stand alongside the chestnut. He, who fears nothing at all from his company (though he still wonders about that small moon that trails the stranger like a satellite) casts his gaze down, too, where the horses bustle like seagulls following sharks. They are too far to hear - the only sound is the wind and the waves that run up against the cliffs and their breathing - and for that he likes the temple even more.

The unicorn is a friendlier thing when he is not irritable, and he is always made irritable by the squabbling commotion of land-horses.

Even as he feels Metaphor’s gaze on him, he does not return it; instead he shifts to watch the waves, glittering bright as diamond dust beneath the sunlight. It is too far to leap, and ah, for a moment he wishes for wings. Amaroq is not accustomed to wishing himself anything other than what he is, and it clenches something dark below his breastbone.

“I am Amaroq,” he says, still staring out over the waters, “of the sea.” A small smile twitches at the corner of his mouth, but the kelpie offers nothing more. He has already given enough: Metaphor is the first to receive even his name.

“I would rather the gods not see me at all,” he says, soft and dry as dead autumn leaves. From what he has heard in his few trips near the city he is not the only one to think so; Amaroq knows no more of the local gods than their names but the ways he heard them spoken was hardly praise.

But the wolf’s gods were not the kind to watch. Their country was the stars that set his course and the frigid depths too cold for life, where bodies drifted after death. They did not look like him and they did not care for him, but they gave his people sharp teeth and sharp horns and sharp wits when the other two failed.

Amaroq’s people built no temples, but each successful hunt was a kind of worship.

Even his tail has fallen still as he stares down at the shimmering sea. His hair floats around him in the breeze, pale wisps of sea-foam and silver cloud, and when at last Metaphor’s voice makes him turn it is with a shake of his head.

At the words of caution a lupine smile draws across his mouth and his tail begins to sway and curl again above the floor. Bits of shell and horn tied there shiver and clack like a string of teeth against the marble. “If there is to be war, I would think this place soon to be rediscovered. It has a way of bringing out religion.” But until then, perhaps it will be his.

He follows Metaphor with his gaze, dipping his head in return, and now his smile is something other than a crack in ice.

It thaws and thaws until it is soft as snow, and when Metaphor is only another red leaf on an autumn path full of them Amaroq turns back into the shadows of the temple.