Smoke, like prayers, rise from extinguished bonfires up, up into the night sky. The only light that falls in silver and bright. Oh when the light of flames is put out, Leto’s body sinks into night. She becoming nothing; another mere shadow stood behind the light of the moon.
 
That was until the blizzard came. It comes as light as dreams first. Each flake is perfect, each flake falls from an open sky like a star. It draws the shed-star girl out from the darkness, it lies in white along the subtle curves of her spine. It settles in her mane, upon the tops of her bells and in her eyelashes (for she does not draw her gaze from the sky, not when the moon it due to change).
 
Oh, in her skin is electricity, in her blood is the song of stars. She is so far from her Ilati home, but the earth is only part of her. She is woven together by roots, but her blood beats with star-white blood. The shed-star girl would not be anywhere else. She could not resist the call of night, oh the singing in her blood is as hot as fire. It is a clarion call, a summons she cannot fight, no matter how hard she may try.
 
Upon her skin is painted sigils, Ilati prayers, Ilati chants, they glow as her white blood flares with the presence of this sky-magic. No longer do shadows own her, not when the Dusk-girl glows with the light of the moon and stars combined. Snow begins to melt upon her skin and then it turns to steam and all over is steaming. Leto is an abony torch, a black flame here to burn the snow out of the sky. She is a black hole struck through with a light than glows from every vein. This girl is a splitting rock, her body holding a star that longs to break forth, to reach up to the stars that shine and the moon that begins to turn red, red, red.
 
Soon the snow is not white, but red as blood. The moon’s light gives each drifting flake wings, until in the breeze they flutter as fireflies might. They swirl and dance upon prayers and chants, they swirl close to Leto in a dalliance to last only the night.
 
But no snow can touch her now, not when the sky bleeds red, when the moon begins to hide, when black comes creeping. The stars flare brighter, white as bone, and still the snow falls bright and red. The winds throw firefly-flakes hither and thither, it tugs at Leto’s ebony mane, it turns her wild. She dances as the shed-stars dance and this time her music is not of the earth but of the sky. There are no drums to vibrate her bones, not when there is the violin keening of stars calling like dragons in the night.
 
A star falls brighter than bright. It douses the flames of falling snow, it steals the red of the eclipse moon, and reminds the earth that it should be white. It falls for Leto, summoned by her magic, enchanted by her bright white skin. And then, just as it should touch her, just as it should smite her like it has a thousand falling snowflakes, it fades in to nothing and all turns to blood again.
 
The black girl turns, flinching as her skin begins to sear, as her body turns hot, hot, hot. Oh her magic is wild now, oh it heeds the call of the moon, of the stars. It cries with the prayers, it dances to the music of its shed-star people, and Leto is running, she is streaking ebony beneath this night of crimson awe. She runs as close to water as she can. Her limbs find no rest until water from a pool laps, laps, beckoning her closer. But she stands, alight, brilliant and bright. She does not enter but begs her magic to calm, prays for it to ease and settle.
 
As she stands beneath the crimson snow, still falling, still as thick as a blood haze, she sees silver to rival the moon. Yet the moon is not silver this night. This silver is as water beneath the moon, as soft as the water that beckons her come. And she does, she moves closer, closer to the silver until it makes before her a man. All she feels is the cool of the sea, the taste of salt upon her tongue.
 
Fate nips as her heels, her hips, her cheeks, her lips. It laughs in her ears and pushes her closer, closer, it whispers in her ears and oh its song is sweet and right and so perfect she does not recognize it as Fate at all. Leto stands before the man and her skull tilts, bells chime and the stars begin to scream and not even the moon can look as it succumbs to blood and black.
 
“Hello.” She says, for how should one greet their fate?

@Amaroq - eeeeeeee. The Most Excited.

| "speaks" | notes: loooooong

amaroq

in his own country
even Death can be kind

maroq, too, knows how to read the stars.

From the time he was a colt with no horn he would lay out on the winter ice and listen to the stories of the stars, the Bear and the Wolf and the Hunter and the dozens of others. They were lessons and guides both, and on clear cold nights a path seemed to open up, a trail between those paths of light. Oh, how many times he had dreamed of hunting in those midnight waters! And some midnights, when their breathing came in plumes and even the whales were sleeping and songless, Amaroq would see a glimpse of the beyond-world. Only ever the border of it, a shimmering, dancing curtain of green and blue and vivid purple, silent and eerie and so close.

One day he would pass beyond that curtain, one day his bones would be settled on the sea-bed as a home for small quick things in the dark but his soul, his soul would swim that great dark surf.

But he does not know the constellations so well here - the kelpie has learned the shape of them, but not the stories. And though it is near midwinter, though the wind howls cold in the mountains and the seals are thick with blubber, he has only seen faint traces of that curtain that marks the border to the after-world.

Tonight feels different. All day he has been unsettled, hunting in the surf and in the deep and catching nothing; last night the moon was crimson at the edges, a blood-trace, a promise. Today the clouds crept in, first stratus to whisper of change, then great thick sheaves of bruised blue, and even as a yearling Amaroq would know what it meant. A blizzard was coming, and blizzards meant change.


When the sky grows dark, when the first flakes drift like chaff from a threshing floor, Amaroq leaves the sea. Tonight is not a time to remain alone in the deep, listening to the whales sin the moon to black; his saltwater blood urges him inland as the snow covers his tracks, as the moon hangs sick and red. There are others, in the night, for it is a holy night even for the land-horses; but the unicorn approaches none of them. He is as a ghost in the storm, sea-grey and snow-white, and he drifts like ice upon the waves with the wind the only music in his ears.

Until he sees the star.

It should not be out - not when the snow is coming thick and fast, not when the winter wind is blowing on the trees and kissing every crevice with cold. But his pale eyes mark it as he falls, and Amaroq, too, begins to run. It is silent in the storm, silent in the snow, silent beneath the bloody dying moon - and he is not alone.

The snow turns red, cold embers from some unfathomable fire, and through this scatter of flakes steps a girl, the bells in her hair chiming like the howling blizzard, her skin seeming split with light like veins in the ice.

The unicorn stops. His breath comes in great plumes, and his neck is curved proud as a wolf’s, and his eyes do not leave her as she comes. He picks out the bones and seed-pearls in her hair as he feels the wind comb through his own, similarly adorned. He sees her eyes, pale ice-chips like his own, silver as stars.

The moon goes dead and dark; the night is lit only by those flakes like discarded stars, and by her strange and shining light. Amaroq does not smile but he feels his heart beating and beating, a wild drum, a savage hunting-song. He tilts his horn to her, grand as a prince extending his hand for a dance.

“Hello,” he says.

Leto stands as if spilled from a midnight forge. Steam plumes from her skin as crimson snow alights upon her scolding skin. She looks up and the bells chime, declaring it as they hang like silver moons from amidst her hair. All about her is a swirling blanket of crimson snow. It settles in her lashes, melting upon her lips and cheeks.
 
When all is black and crimson, when stars blink bright, down, down upon the snow that turns from white to crimson beneath the light of the blood moon, Leto is the torch that remains.
 
She is marble, light splitting through the obsidian of her skin. She is riddled with light, split open like a shell. The Ilati girl has heard tales of another girl, a creature who holds light within her all the time. A god, made mortal, so the tales whisper. Leto wonders if that mortal-god burns too.
 
She still cannot breathe. Leto still aches as she pulls against the chain that tethers her tight. But here, this night, she might forget the anchor she so carelessly loosed. She might forget how fate will come creeping with death nipping at its heels.
 
And she does for this night is so far from the sea, so far from oracles who whisper of girls dying in the salt of the sea. Her eyes close and her chin tilts up, up to the sky. Where is her Ilati blood now? It is water beneath the oil of her shed-star magic. Oh the girl embraces the eclipse as it turns all to blood and bone.
 
From the dark, from amidst the shower of blood-red snow, tumbling like tears from the sky, a unicorn emerges. He is silver bright, sharp as a water forged blade. Oh he fills her lungs with the beauty of him. A horn pierces the storm and how the blood-flakes swirl about it. They dance for him, settling like roses into his hair, lying like droplets of ruby blood across his torso.
 
Has she seen anything as beautiful as he? The night bears him proudly to her, the eclipse adorning him in wonder and majesty. Was he walking to her, or she to him? Oh that thought whispers from just beyond her conscious. It slips into her veins like whiskey and wine. Her magic is humming, awoken and bright and though the stars call for her, she cannot pull her eyes from him.
 
When has this girl bothered with such beauty? When has she let her gaze linger, as if wantonly, over anything before. Leto tugs her gaze from him, but he is closer now, his pale eyes a mirror to her own. The moon croons to these two night creatures, it reminds them what it is when the moon dances across water and- oh! Yes, water tastes sweet upon her tongue. Magic breathes upon her skin and its voice is a wave sighing up, up upon the beach.
 
Since when has she thought of beauty like this? Since when has she not been able to pull her gaze from that which she finds alluring? It all began with Asterion and her thoughts are tumbling down the anchor-line and deep, deep into the ocean of hopes she has made for her king to fulfill. The scent of water upon this silver creature has her mind so full of a king of stars and water.
 
Her heart thrums within her veins, it is keening as she steps closer to this stranger and tastes the sea-scent that clings to him. Salt is upon her tongue and her veins burn hot, hot, hot with warning star fire. Oh she would pull the stars out of the sky just to be rid of her fate for one small moment. But the stranger’s  horn is lowering, his lips are pulling into an enchanting smile and her eyes are filled with silver and her lungs with salt water.
 
"You smell of the ocean," the girl murmurs as fate begins to bloom. "Have you left it far behind?'

@Amaroq | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make

amaroq

in his own country
even Death can be kind

he is a shadow wearing starlight, the darkest thing in this night of strange lights beneath the blood-red moon. The bells she wears chime as though to mark a holy night and Amaroq thinks that they are not wrong - for the kelpie does not believe in miracles but he does believe in signs, and even he has seen few sights like this.

He feels more alive than he has since he left behind the ice, since his people were slaughtered by silver blades beneath no moon at all. And his eyes, pale as wild snowflakes tossed by the blizzard, do not leave the shape of the girl. The unicorn thinks that she must feel it too, this feral pull (is it orchestrated by the moonlight, by the storm? Would they have met beneath a baleful sun, or when the bite of winter did not seize them by the throat?) for her eyes are latched on his own.

When the wind dies away with a last gasp the world is thrust to stillness. There is nothing, nothing but silence and the crimson moon and the flakes that have been set free to drift as they will, a slow and solemn dance until they light upon their skin. Each is a cold kiss that the kelpie does not feel.

It is well Amaroq doesn’t know it’s a king she thinks of, a man of soft seas and far stars. He is too distant, of late, to be jealous - but for her, this stranger bound with tokens so like his own, who meets him so boldly beneath a prophet’s sky, he thinks that he would hunt.

Or perhaps it is only the blizzard, turning the blood in his veins to ice.

Ice blooms upon him now, strange flowers made of frost, vines of it that wrap up and around the long spiral of his horn in delicate patterns like lace.

Still he does not smile, not even when she invokes the ocean, and begins unwinding a prophecy that he knows nothing of. “It is never far from me,” he says, and wonders whether he could knit up all of the distance between them before she grows afraid. Amaroq finds he wants to touch those bells, to fog them with his breath, to see if they might chime for him. Oh, but what song could they hope to sing underwater?

“And what have you left behind to come here?” With a sweep of his horn he gestures to the sky, to the moon that burns like a thousand-year fire and the snowflakes like ashes that come to melt upon them both.

There is a sea laughing within her ears, bubbling in her veins. She hears it, she feels its salt-slick touch frothing through her blood vessels. Her tongue betrays the earth and she dare not use it, for fear laments would chime out with the rolling of the waves. Would her voice become the rhythmic wash of a lamenting sea shanty?
 
She keeps her lips tight and layers fertile soil within her mouth. Enough to nourish roots that tie, tie her tongue down to the ground of her earthen mouth.
 
But hasn’t Fate been laughing as she whispers suggestions in the ears of those who listen, pushing them like tides this way and that to come at last to her planned destination. Leto watches, her destination now in sight, but her eyes unable to recognize it…
 
All is still, the world awaiting with bated breath for Fate’s next whisper. His breath rolls like silver waves, it sighs from his lungs like the tide hissing over sandy shores. She does not know what it is to feel sand shift beneath her feet, nor salt-water spill across her feet. But she has begun to dream.
 
Oh Leto dreams of a girl loosed of the chains that bind her to prophesy. She dares to dream of a girl that can swim, ink within the sea, floating, swirling mixing until she is one. Then she dreams of lungs so filled with wicked water and wakens, sweat-slick.
 
Such weaknesses she hides. Such fears she dampens down wetting them like kindling to slow the fire of her fear. A shudder shakes her bones, rippling along the curves of her back. The stars are laughing, no, they are weeping. Their tears fall white-hot and searing. They burn warnings upon her flesh, wicked where the blood rain is a cooling balm.
 
Her bells sing in the silence of the eclipse. They fill silence up like a cup: full, full and the star-girl drinks in the liquor of their song. But he is speaking, commanding her eyes to him and oh he is silver and ice.
 
It is never far from me, and Leto very well believes him. The ocean surges beneath his skin, it crystallizes in the icy point of his horn that dares even the stars to melt its wicked tip. He is the wicked sea and she the earth to drink him all down, down. Her chin tips up as Fate laughs yet louder still, whispering, whispering.
 
There is a king who will teach her how to swim. Their stars are shared, for he has constellations upon his skin and she has stars within her blood. He is water and Leto… oh, she is the wild fire of her starfire blood. They are water and fire and endless, endless stars. Her chin tips up and her lips smile for she dares to believe she might conquer the sea with limbs that know how to ride waves as well as stars.
 
“Is it the sea that clings to you, or you to it?” The starfire girl says, soft, dangerous, as if he were a viper, as if a droplet of water still upon his skin might become an ocean enough to drown her. And yet, oh how she yearns for it! As her blood burns with celestial fire, wicked, bright, white.
 
But, what has Leto left to be here (beneath this crimson sky like blood, like snow and like neither at all)? “Everything and nothing.” she declares in a voice as bold as the sun loosing from itself a solar storm. Her smile is splitting stars and the dark of black holes swallowing night. “The earth.” She confesses, her tongue freed of vines. She smiles, feeling the satin touch of sigils upon her skin, they grow like ivy and drink from this silver boy every drop of water he bears.
 
When Leto closes her eyes then, filling all of herself with starfire and ivy, she knows when her eyes open, setting themselves upon the ice of his silver skin that she will not tremble, but burn, hot, like stars.

@Amaroq | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make

amaroq

in his own country
even Death can be kind

maroq does not believe in fate.

It is not a law that his people bend to, not when they swim the waters like an osprey does the sky, not when they have a kingdom below their feet that others can never fathom. They set their direction by the stars but they are wild things, they are hunters, they choose their own path and their own prey. His god is the sea-ice, teaching him when to be hard and cold and when to yield and soften and draw back. His law is the one of tooth and claw.

Yet is he not an exile? The kelpie has not wondered whether he is free.

Neither does he now. How could he be otherwise, when the moon hangs red as a sunken copper coin above them, when the snow settles like pollen along his skin and does not melt? Amaroq shakes his head at her question; his teeth flash small and bright as the seed-pearls woven into her dark mane. “Why should it be one or the other?” he asks, and his gaze is as cold and sharp as the point of his horn of bone. “I belong to it, and it belongs to me.”

The unicorn settles back, then, regarding her, this girl whose veins are like a leaf’s, burning bright beneath her skin. Her eyes are a solstice moon, her bells toll merry and mournful by turns. When she tilts her chin up higher, proud and foolish, Amaroq smiles too.

It is not a comforting thing.

When she answers him he snorts, a soft sound that billows steam from his nostrils like a dragon. He is no more a creature of riddles than a wolf or a bear or a seal, and when she names the earth he shakes his head, for to him she has not left it at all. It is beneath them still, albeit slumbering under its blanket of snow.

He wants to smell her skin, to taste for himself what she has left behind to be here, and what it is that makes her shine so, luminous as the fish who never swim high enough to meet the light coming through the water. As she closes her eyes he steps nearer, until he could lay his horn across her shoulder like a knight, until he is too near even to plunge it into her heart. Beneath the clean scent of snow she smells of something rich and almost-sweet, like soil and leaves at the end of autumn. His eyes trace along her sigils bold as finger-tips, his lips still trace a smile.

“And are you satisfied by what you have found here?” he asks, and his voice curls around her soft and cool as the winter sea.

He is red and silver. The red snow lies like petals along his spine. They are blood red droplets that do not melt nor darken the moonlight of his flesh.
 
This strange sea-boy might be the only thing here that remembers what the moon should be. Not even the moon recalls who she should be as she hangs, pregnant and crimson, in the black night sky. Leto would watch her, if her gaze was not trailing along the curve of his lips. On and on that bow of his mouth goes. Up and up toward the slant of his jaw. Leto blinks, slow, slow, but enough to clear the gathering blood-snow upon her lashes. Enough to try and see more clearly whether that is the line of his too long lips or simply a shadowed angle of his face.
 
The closer she leans, eyes upon lips, mane upon skin as slick as sea-froth, the greater the draw that claws her in. And the louder her blood sings, a shrill and echoing whale-song of danger! Danger!. Only when a speck of crimson snow settles like a ruby in the corner of his too-long-lips does she sway away at last.
 
He is smiling at her brazen pose, at the tilt of her chin. The touch of his eyes is iceberg sharp and she the great ship too clumsy to turn fast. Ah! He makes her slow, as if drunk upon his poison, drunk upon the winter solstice moon. Her bells chime their warning, they no longer peel in merry lullabies but clang like blades meeting beneath the sea. Her eyes shut with their final clang and all is silent and all of her is full of salt-water.
 
His breath upon her skin is the wash of the tide and her eyes open to gaze upon the blood moon. There is a song within her ears and it is the sound of a shell’s lilting song – it is the sound of Amaroq’s horn splitting air and bending close, close to her skin and to her heart. His smile is teeth upon her torso, his words are seaweed wrapping about her limbs, pulling her deeper, deeper.
 
Slowly she lowers her gaze from the moon. Silver and bright it falls like a star until it settles upon his eyes. There she holds him and where sea-weed holds her, so she binds him up in vines. Her cheek is scant millimeters from his, the air warm as a hearth between them. “Yes.” Leto answers, honest and bold, for she is satisfied. Her sigils glow and a new star falls, it tumbles like an angel cursed. It burns through snow and smoke, ice and moonlight. It strikes the earth and star-fire blooms marking her turn to smile. “Are you?” She asks with eyes that challenge, with a heart that wonders, wonders, wonders. “If you have come hungering,” She whispers in a song of galaxies and bones, “then this is not your night, kelpie.” For what did she have to fear when the sea is so far from her this eve?

@Amaroq | "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make

amaroq

in his own country
even Death can be kind

e, too, should be studying the moon in her changeable face, letting the blood-light of her soak into his skin. Surely it means good fortune, a hunter’s moon, a promise to a people whose teeth are always sharp.

Instead it is her face he regards, as though it carries some sign for him, some meaning. Is it there in the faint gleam of her eyes, pale as his own but burning with star-fire where his are only cold? Is there some answer for him in the song of her bells, in the rattle of his bones and shells to match them? If he counted each seed-pearl caught in the black of her hair would they spell out soft words of fate?

But Amaroq only believes in chance and in readiness.

Still he does not touch her, though his hair blows between them as the wind stirs, pale and delicate as foam against the rich black of her skin. And her own, equally unbound, lays across his shoulder, dark as a fissure against the curve of his neck. Each breath he draws unspools a little more of her secrets: now a trace of wood-smoke, now of rich dark loam. He smells no king upon her skin, only the things of the wild. The kelpie wonders if they are lies - is she a tame thing, too, a beast of castles and courts and nothing savage, nothing free?

Then she catches him with her gaze, holds him like a promise. Then the sigils flare brighter than snow-flakes or seed-pearls on her skin and there, oh, there! From the gleam in her eye he sees a falling star, a piece of the moon discarded, and he turns away to watch its track until it flares upon the snow. The air then smells sharp and hot despite the snow.

He is still turned away at her question, still wondering in the silent dark. The moon above is wondering, too, and changing - already a crescent thin as a fingernail is white again, already the eclipse is ending. Soon the world will let go its great breath.

“I am never satisfied,” he says, though he wonders as he does if this time it is a lie. Surely something in feels sated at the place where that star flared and died; or perhaps it is only because she has called him what he is. “and I am always hungry.” When he turns back to her his eyes are like the moon, full and strange.

But then he smiles again and he is almost just a unicorn (if a unicorn could ever be just anything), and only now - only because what she says sounds to him like a challenge - does he reach for her, and touch his lips to her neck, and breath a pattern of frost against the sigils that burn so bright and old against her skin. “You are lucky that tonight it is only for wonders.”  

Blood snow lies like a cloak over both their spines. Beside her, adorned in blood and moonlight, he looks dangerous. Touching her, he feels lethal.
First it is the press of his gaze - across her cheeks, her eyes, her lashes, her mouth her hair. Each place his gaze touches feels cold like shells and hot as lava. Her cheeks burn with his attention and beneath the satin black of her skin is the rush of warm, warm blood. Her heart is a drumbeat, the thrumming of woodland, the crashing of waves…
 Then it is brush of his breath like the cold wash of a wave. Inside her blood is full of saltwater coursing. Outside, her skin is slick with ocean brine. She is drowning, drowning. Does he taste the salt upon her skin? Where sweat beads like sea-pearls, catching the light of her magic and blinking like stars in the midnight of her body, there too salt clings as seaspray upon the shore. Salt presses in crystals along her coat – jagged shorelines - and oh the groan of the ocean is loud, loud in her ears. He paints her in coastlines and glittering seascapes. And her first error is to turn into him, to see the glint of his teeth, to follow that long, long curl of his lips. Their corner tips up unto the moon. She rises like night to frame the stars which laugh and cry for the girl that is sinking into the ocean.
 Finally his lips press against her throat soft as a kiss, cold as frostbite, wicked as a cut. Does he not burn? Her magic swells hotter, hotter. She is no candle lit by a flame. Her blood is not just salt water but gasoline. Her magic sparks in her blood and only her skin holds in that wild fire. Starlight bursts from the cracks in her veins and arteries. She glows brighter than starlight, brighter that whitelight. She leans into the monster, enchanted by the sea he wears and desperate to see if his lips burn when she feels so close to detonation.
 The kelpie whispers of hunger and satisfaction… of wonders made of midnight things and blood red moons… His touch breaks with his words and at once she can breathe. Suddenly the waters recede and she gasps a breath that stings with snow and crimson light. She sways toward him, drunk and foolish, disarmed and full, full of fate’s salt-sweet lure. To him, away from him, she rocks like a ship. Desire draws tight as a rope between them. But oh each moment, each breath she takes reminds her, reminds a girl that her death is no such sweet thing.
 Her lungs feel the ache of drowning, they tremble with the taste of salt-water filling them up until she is brimful. He is destruction and chaos has her shoulder pressing against his. Fate has her eyes bright and wicked as starfire drinking in all of him, desiring the worst of him. Salvation has her ears low and sharp as ruins atop her poll. It has her breath gasping, her lungs trembling and her limbs fitful. It has a kings name upon her lips, begging, begging, unspoken, unspoken and at last she peels her skin from his, looking at last to her home, her king and not an ocean and teeth and blood and wonders, so many, many wonders.
 His words are teeth marks upon her throat, cutting where his lips touched, grazing where his breath caressed. The star-fire girl knows the threat and she whispers to him, wantingly, loathingly, “And the other nights? Are they for hunting?” me? the word is there, sharp upon her tongue. It is glass in her mouth and the pain sings through her body as she does not tear her eyes from Terrastella. A king’s scent clings to her skin and she drinks it in, in, in until her soul is full of the sea, until her breath is the hiss of starfire and oceans.
 Desire, desire, desire – it burns in her veins. She craves the ocean and a king and a monster and fate laughs, laughs, laughs in the dark spaces between stars.



@Amaroq - this took an actual age just to post, aiiiii

| "speaks" | notes: loooooong

amaroq

in his own country
even Death can be kind

h, his mouth does burn where it breathes cool upon her flushed and feverish skin - but it is the bite of frost and cold, a smile carved from the moon, a sliver of a glacier unthawed for millenniums. There, so close, is the leaping pulse of her throat, a brook that he might swim in, a river he might taste. It’s tempting, the thought of curling his lips back from his teeth, of pressing their points against that velvet-black, the question of how neatly she might fit between his jaws -

Yet it is winter and it’s a different kind of hunger that has him. Not one for blood and meat but one that makes his body feel composed of harp-strings of sinew, trembling beneath the press of her shoulder, begging to be played. One that makes the loneliness in him feel like a well that he might yet freeze over and shatter to nothingness with the right companion - the right mate. He wants to swim beneath the breakers, to hunt the kelp forests ever-waving in the gloom, to flush prey of seals and sharks, but not alone. Each time she shivers back into him feels like a new kind of dare, like fingers plucking a song of him he’s forgotten how to play.

Amaroq wants to snarl when she pulls away at last; he wants to groan. Most of all he wants to knit up the distance between them again, to put his mouth back at the juncture of her jaw, to taste of the life leaping there and make it something greater yet. Would her bells cry out a warning, then, or a different kind of song?

But the ocean is far from here, and the only salt is on their skin, and the snow smells like nothing at all. He blows out a long breath of silver fog, turns his gaze on her cold enough to burn, smiles in a way that hints at as many promises as teeth. “If you really want to know, I’ll show you.” There are so many things I could show you.

How difficult it is to turn away - but is he a wolf turning away from a doe, or another of his kind? It doesn’t matter, not tonight; the kelpie doesn’t look back. And as he walks (back to the sea) the moon sheds its crimson robe and the night is still, remembering what it was like to be so briefly holy.