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+---- Thread: [P] anyone's ghost; (/showthread.php?tid=5308)
anyone's ghost; - Amaroq - 08-01-2020
amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
He returns with the winter, when ice chokes up the harbor and fog creeps up the streets.
He returns for her.
Guilt is not a feeling he takes to naturally - not he, creature of instinct and need, of hunger and survival. But he knows, he knows, that the way he left her was cruel, and wrong, and it is not what he had meant to happen. There is a new scar, carved by a sword, that travels a thin silver line from his shoulder to his throat. There is a new wariness, a new hostility, to the other horses he passes as he walks further into Denocte, with the bells of the harbor tolling ghostly in the mist.
He has always hated them, these land-horses, so graceless and obtuse. But he has never bled at their hands, not until the island, not until the pirate.
Tonight they avoid him, this ghost-grey unicorn who parts like the mist as though he’s born of it. He can feel their eyes on him, the draw that has always been between his kind and theirs; if he were hunting, he would smile. If he were hunting, he would catch their eye and beckon them closer, closer. But Amaroq is tracking something different, something made and not born. Something he owes, and regrets.
In the city the fog mixes with the bonfire smoke, damp limbs crackling an ancient kind of music. In the city the buildings hem him in, more dangerous than the shining cliffs of icebergs. In the city he is not a king of anything, and he knows it, and the bones and shells wound in his hair chime of warning and loss.
He is looking for a flame in the shape of a woman. He is looking for Boudika, and he will find her if he has to hunt until summer.
@Boudika |
RE: anyone's ghost; - Boudika - 08-07-2020
W
inter in Denocte reminds of her of her first coming here; it reminds her of racing every day to the mountain and coming back by sundown to perform, a dancer, a pacifist. Those days are distant; they belong to a girl so different she is nearly a stranger.Boudika returns to the city, however, because it is her home as much as the sea is. There is a reason water horses have legs and not only fins; and there is a strange, foreign comfort she feels in smelling the wood smoke and walking past the citizens. She nearly returned to Denocte wearing another’s face—anyone’s face, but her own—but the idea seemed too much a lie, and so she had refrained from using her magic to veil her visit.
Instead, Boudika simply is.
She is the bonfires, and the singing streets, and the clamorous sound of voices in Denocte’s City Square. Normally so vibrant, the mare feels subdued tonight; quieted, as ghosts so often are. She haunts her old ventures; she even visits the tavern where she had performed, night by night. But then Boudika leaves it from where she watches through the window. She leaves it easily, as she has left everything else: with a delicate severing of ties, with the understanding it was never her own. And she returns to the hungry, boisterous streets of the city she loves.
There are lovers and children, patrons closing shop and innkeepers opening their own. The air is full of smoke and fog, and the city is beginning to lay to rest; quietly. Boudika is beginning to walk back toward the docks, toward the sea.
Until she hears the chiming.
Until she hears a sound like the sea, but in mourning.
Boudika wants to turn away. But the sound itself grounds her. While she is distracted, the two dragons abandon perch and fly away; the fog seems deep, impenetrable, as if brought in from the shore. Boudika had not noticed it so intensely before, so clearly—but it seems a harbinger of something else, something—
Someone she had thought dead.
Or lost.
(Really, is it not the same?)
Boudika wrenches herself from her stupor; she turns her neck to glance down the street and sees him there, clearly. The spire of his horn catches her eyes first; but it is the sound of the bones and shells chiming in his mane that captures her, that prevents her from running—it sounds like,
it sounds like
going home. The way the surf tumbles stones, sand, glass, shells end-over-end.
Boudika waits; she watches him, the way the crowd parts as if he is a blade cutting through it. She aches in a way she does not expect.
It is the ache of longing; of looking at something that should have been with the knowledge that it never became what it was meant to. The possibility is what hurts her; the resonant knowing of, he should have been there. With her. Teaching her, guiding her, helping her Become.
And he had left.
It is the burning question that keeps her from leaving.
Why?
Boudika approaches him with the confidence of a wildcat; she parts the crowd as he does and meets him in the street.
It is not right, she thinks, to be meeting here. For their reunion to be between the smothered streets of Denocte instead of the wide open coastline; if they had been there, she thinks, she might have been joyous. But here—she is stifled; she feels outside herself.
“You left.” Boudika says. Not a question, or even an accusation.
Just a matter of fact.
this is who we were, before bones, before dirt, even before light
this untameable expanse, this blue mirror of god. this heaving,
churning proof that we have always been deep, restless souls.
RE: anyone's ghost; - Amaroq - 08-18-2020
amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
It is the furthest he’s ever come into the city.
For days he haunted the shores and coves, the ragged mouth of coastline that widened its jaws around Denocte. He sought her amongst the ice which sometimes sat silent and sometimes groaned like a mother. He hunted her among the beaches where seals watched him dark-eyed and uneasy. He went into the mountains, only as far as the crescent-moon lake, but even in doing so he knew he would not find her there.
Boudika is too much a thing of the sea.
At last, when all his nights ended empty, he began to look among the land-horses. Every time a dragon passed over he fell as still as a wolf, wondering if it belonged to the unicorn-queen - that one would be grown, by now, and Isra had not seemed the sort to forget her promises.
This evening, as the fog rolls and douses even some of Denocte’s bonfires, his gaze touches each horse he passes and falls away. He doesn’t imagine their lives, or pay attention to the way they watch him until they loose him in the soft gray night. The fog holds sounds close, sharing little beyond the opening and closing of doors, the ring of hooves on cobblestones. Voices that may as well be the chatter of gulls.
And then she is there. His heart loosens like a fist unclenching, a tension he hadn’t known he was holding. Amaroq does not smile often, but he does now, and it remains when he looks over her body like a lover long away and finds no wounds, no signs of hardship. Then it is back to her gaze, embers to his ice, and his mouth only fades to a flat line again when she speaks.
“I was driven away,” he says, and pride keeps his eyes on hers, his neck arched where shame wants it bent, ”after I saw you last.” His new scar itches; he wants to touch it as he did a hundred times while it was bleeding, scabbing, healing. Instead he reaches for her - not with teeth, but muzzle to muzzle, the soft skin of his nose. A mingling of breath.
“I regret it.” It is not I am sorry, or forgive me; the unicorn does not know how to say either, though perhaps he means them both. And there is more yet he wants to say - that she’d deserved more, that he wishes he could have seen her as she learned herself anew, that he missed her.
For months he hasn’t spoken. For months his nearest companions have been the porpoises, and the leopard seals, and the distant stars whose reflections trembled on the surface of the water. It feels strange to talk now; he would rather speak to her with the turn of an ear, the slide of a glance, the corner of his mouth. So he surprises himself when he asks, “Are you happy, Boudika?”
@Boudika |
RE: anyone's ghost; - Boudika - 08-27-2020
B
oudika is struck by his disbelonging. She can scarcely comprehend his presence in the streets of Denocte; in her mind he is forevermore wild, a creature of sea, surf, sand, storm. He belongs to the froth of the waves, the crest of the ocean in the mid-distance. He does not belong here. Somehow, it makes him seem smaller.Or perhaps that is her fury, that mounts within her like a tigress unleashed.
(But, so too bubbles a soft relief; a sudden breath that is released, a breath she had not known she’d been holding for… how long? Months? Years? A breath that says--you are not dead, a breath that says, you are not gone forever. Suddenly, he is resurrected from her worst conclusions.)
Alive. Alive. Alive.
He is alive! There is a voice within her, full of disbelief and wonder and hope.
But so too: her anger clenched to her breast like fists, tight and coiling and righteous.
Boudika listens bright-eyed and uncertain to his explanation. She wants to say: it is not good enough.
He should have taken her with him.
He should have told her.
I was driven away after I saw you last. I regret it. Those sea-eyes are upon her, close as the water is when she dives deep. They take stock of every inch, and when they do so Boudika softens. He reaches toward her, and the uncoiling of her rage is complete; the soft brush of his muzzle is intimate, tender, familiar.
She thinks: I know this body like no other body. The seashells and bone-bits, a song in her ears. The mottled, seal-like gray. They had never needed words as she had needed them with others. That soft touch is a revelation: it is the same as the sea after a raging storm, serene and gentle, bringing upon itself warmer waters and easy meals. Glistening like a gem. Boudika knows he is sorry without him saying it; and she wants to believe that he had left because he had had no choice. Still, she asks: “Who?” Her voice is salt in a wound; raw-edged; stinging. “Who drove you away?” It takes her longer than she would have liked to find the new scar on his skin, still puckered and pink. Age will soften it, she thinks.
Are you happy Boudika?
She thinks of all that has happened since he had left. Boudika thinks of how Denocte, once her place of shelter and wellbeing, had become a prison of buildings. She thinks of Isra leaving; of the Sun King, Orestes, who she had found at last; of Tenebrae and the cave and the pomegranates; of the magic unfolding within her the way fruit ripens. Her expression complicates itself; a glint to the eyes, a twitch to the ear, and she is pressing closer in disbelief. The scent of him fills her with memories of fear, hatred, excitement, affection, with unbecoming and becoming. Salt. Sea. Fish. Sun-baked sand. The ice of his skin. Boudika answers, “Sometimes. Were you?”
In the cave, Tenebrae had asked: if Amaroq returned, would you go with him?
She had said, of course. But the admission and the actuality do not align in her mind; in many ways, she feels as if she does not know him.
But in stronger ways still: she feels as if he is the only one who knows her.
She is quiet and still for a long moment. She nearly says, there had been someone while you were away, someone who-- Boudika does not know how to explain it, or if the intimacy is even a betrayal. He had left. She had thought him dead. And it does not taste that way, on her tongue. For now, she does not divulge the fact: she turns her face into his mane and says, “I am happier now.”
Not, I was terribly lonely.
Not, I did not know what I was.
Not, I did not know what to become.
No, because Boudika learned herself. And perhaps she is better for it. Perhaps his disappearance had done her a favor; but this is a truth she keeps somewhere secret, somewhere between her heart and ribs, a sliver like a piece of glass. She is better for it, for having been alone. “We do not belong here,” Boudika says quietly, gesturing toward the buildings, the scent of bonfire, the crowd that cuts around them as if they are rocks in a strong current. She says it, and turns to walk toward the sea.
Then, she cuts her eyes toward him. Something must be said.
“Amaroq?” His name is a pearl in her mouth. “It matters more, that you came back.”
this is who we were, before bones, before dirt, even before light
this untameable expanse, this blue mirror of god. this heaving,
churning proof that we have always been deep, restless souls.
RE: anyone's ghost; - Amaroq - 09-06-2020
amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
He likes to see the anger in her eyes, like looking up at the sun through the surface of the water; it means she is alive. It means she is no less than she was when they parted with the taste of the other’s blood in their mouths. It means she is still herself, a woman who -
Who he respects. (Who he could love, if he could remember how to love. But that has never been a useful feeling for his kind.)
She allows them to trade breath; the touch of her skin, rather than settle him, makes him feel more wild. It makes him think that the others should be wary, and not him, though he is a wolf in a village not without its weapons. Who? she asks, and his tail lashes, splitting only fog. Shame curls his lip, anger colors his eyes, but because she asked, he answers.
“We did not trade names. He was big, and black-faced, with horns not unlike yours.” And had Amaroq’s back not been to the sea - he might not have come back. He might never have left at all; his bones might be coral, his shells returned to sand.
Their conversation, like the fog, rolls on. His mouth twitches, a glint of a smile, at her reply. Happiness: another feeling with little use, more fleeing and complicated than joy. Though he had asked the question of her, it feels strange to apply to himself, an ill-fitting skin. “Sometimes.”
Though she does not see it, his smile grows when she speaks again. Her breath feels good and warm against his neck and he stands still and quiet, enough to hear the ocean murmuring down at the docks.
He misses her when she draws away, but follows her indication of the city. “No,” he agrees, and there is relief in the words, not only because she’d said them but because she said we. He does not add that he likes it better this way, cloaked in fog, muffled by winter, cold as a last breath. That the glow of the fires against the white makes him think of that long-ago home, that winter makes them all fearful and thankful to be indoors, with the ice and the darkness shut out.
The unicorn follows her toward the sea.
But his eyes meet hers when she speaks his name. The syllables land like an arrow striking; how long has it been since he’s heard it on another’s lips? Not since she spoke it on the island. And before that- ?
“It isn’t good to be alone,” he says softly, an echo of their first meeting. And then, because there is something he must say, too, he blows out a soft breath. “I am sorry I didn’t help you look for him. I will, if - if you are still searching.” Ice grows around his heart even as he says it.
@Boudika |
RE: anyone's ghost; - Boudika - 09-18-2020
T
here is a stinging in her throat that feels like swallowed tears. It opens itself in-between the quiet of their breaths, the slight pause between the inhalation and exhalation. It is true; they have never needed words between them, as she had always needed words as a barrier between herself and others. Before Amaroq answers (and how is it Boudika already knows the answer, in her heart and hearts, a truth wedged there like a blood clot waiting to kill?) the silence between them stretches, stretches, stretches. Rather than growing taunt, it simply grows. It is full of all the things she loves about the sea, and sky, and stars.
They are this, and this alone:
Skin. Salt. Air, between flesh. The restless current of all the world’s oceans, the life teeming beneath the surface. She knows that together they could dance beneath glaciers and into caverns of the deep; they would feel no fear, and their silence beneath the surface would resonate with the beauty of a whale’s song. Boudika holds the feeling; she holds the feeling back with the tears in her eyes and already the rage is eaten up by the greater other, already she is past it, a storm in the open sea.
We did not trade names. He was big, and black-faced, with horns not unlike yours.
But, sometimes, storms take unpredictable courses. Sometimes, they make land. Sometimes, they wrap doves up in their winds and waters and send them out to die over the open ocean.
She does not know how she keeps her face impassive; how she lets the silence grow into her own armour, how the surprise is not a surprise at all but instead only the blood clot rupturing.
“Let’s talk philosophy,” she had said one evening over their studies, rather wickedly. They had been young, then, and brazen in a way that experience would weather.
He flicked his eyes at her, over his parchment papers. They looked hard green in the dim light, instead of their stormy teal. “Oh?”
“If you have to die, how do you want to go?” She leaned closer, to whisper conspiratiously.
The laugh Vercingtorix gave was languid. “There’s a poet who says, ‘find what you love… and let it kill you.’”
“He… is a ghost I know.” Salt, and salt again. Her mouth feels full of it. She stings of it. But rather than dwell, she fixates:
On the smile that is nearly a smile at the edge of his mouth.
On the fact that he is alive, and Vercingtorix did not succeed.
(The fact that Vercingtorix was alive, and in Novus, and how that felt both like fear and elation and disdain packaged into one)>
It is a blessing when they shed the city block by block; when they make their way to the sea. Boudika misses the island; the sentiment overcomes her so briefly she nearly does not recognise it. The magic of it. The wildness.
It isn’t good to be alone.
Oh, Amaroq.
Do you know the way the words wash over her, a baptism of pain, of becoming?
No, she thinks.
It isn’t.
But--there is a certain resolve to accepting one’s fate. How many legends of exile exist, of goddesses and nymphs imprisoned to islands, caverns, cells?
How many times has she awoken to the same?
Boudika knows some are meant to be alone.
The longer she lives, the more she believes it is her due.
But, tonight, she is not. Boudika turns to face him with a sudden, hopeful brightness. Her eyes are bright as fire; the sea is a song in her ears; tonight, they are not the last of their kind. Tonight, they are not alone. “No.” Boudika agrees. “It isn’t.”
He surprises her, then, with the renewal of his promise. It sets him apart, inexplicably, from any man she has ever known before. The integrity of it awakens within her a fierce appreciation; something like love, but woven a bit truer. Boudika presses close again; her nose dips to the vulnerable alcove beneath his throat, the soft center of his chest, where when she stills she can feel his heart beat, beat, beat a beautiful rhythm.
Boudika closes her eyes. The ocean shushes. Denocte crackles behind them with fire and light and life, and other pains seem far and forgotten. “I found him.” she says. “He is not the same.”
It seems noncommittal.
Boudika adds, raising to press cheek-to-cheek. “But neither am I.”
The girl who sought and lost and ran upon the shore so long ago. No. She has grown, too, into something other. And that other stands pressed before Amaroq with wild hair and wild eyes and a vivacious thrumming beneath the surface, a thrumming of life like a song. Boudika smiles; perhaps a little shyly. She steps away from him, and away again, until she is ankle deep in the winter sea. With a lash of her tail, she splashes him with a fan of water. "Amaroq..." Boudika's expression flits coyly. "We are not alone, anymore."
this is who we were, before bones, before dirt, even before light
this untameable expanse, this blue mirror of god. this heaving,
churning proof that we have always been deep, restless souls.
RE: anyone's ghost; - Amaroq - 10-03-2020
amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
Amaroq had never expected his life to become entwined with any of the horses of Novus.
He had expected to taste their blood. He had expected (oh, and he had) to change them by force, and not request; to multiply his own kind, to repay the sins of others whose lives were lived and spent a hundred miles from these shores.
And yet his gaze is filled with the flame of her; Boudika, whose crimson is a bonfire against the fog of winter, whose voice is a spark against the flint of his heart. Even as her voice turns bitter as maror he smiles, for he had survived, and a new scar was nothing to him. He had earned a lifetime of them, and this one, at least, had been better earned than most - and he still had the retribution to attend too.
“Your ghosts are not friendly,” he remarks wryly. Around them, city lives continue in the mist. Someone is calling out the last goods of the day; a bell peals the hour, distant and doleful. But such things are not for the likes of them, and soon the sound of the ocean overcomes them, washing them away decibel by decibel until the waves are the only thing he hears. They beckon, the way they always have; they hush him like a lullaby, the way they always have.
Some part of him still can’t believe he’s found her, even when his gaze turns to hers again, and catches the fire alive in her eyes. There on the beach with the water foaming at their feet they pause, her nose below his throat, and he closes his eyes to feel such distant things awaking as happiness and want. How long has it been, since he’s felt the warmth of another, since he’s felt their very heartbeat? How long since he’s thought, for her I would be prey?
It’s almost enough that the question’s answer doesn’t matter. But when it comes, Amaroq sighs the way the sea does, and leans into her touch. “Yes,” he agrees. “I think that you are…more than when I met you.” By which he means, her sorrow is not a thing he can taste, like salt or like iron. By which he means, she no longer seems like she might fling herself into the sea, and welcome the drowning.
When she steps away he finds he misses the warmth of her, and misses the song her blood had sang so close to his own. His own cold, he feels, had made him numb until this moment - but now the tides are alive in his blood again, and they are pulling, inexorable, toward the woman before him. Though he is her Maker, oh! It seems she could unravel him with so little as a look, and yet it is only the foam of the sea that touches his hooves until she speaks the syllables of his name.
Each droplet of water she splashes toward him turns to ice and falls, glimmering like a diamond, back onto the surface of the sea; and then he is after her, plunging into the water (home again, home even now) with the crush of pebbles beneath his feet and his chest against the warmth of her. “No,” he says, a breath in her ear, though they are alone, for all the ways the fog hides them from the city. “Though I hardly remember what it is to be otherwise.”
@Boudika |
RE: anyone's ghost; - Boudika - 10-10-2020
Y
our ghosts are not friendly. Boudika wants to laugh; but she is afraid if she starts, she will cry. And so she only says, noncommittally, “No. They are not.” The grief passes over her features as a cloud might the sun; and then it is gone, moved on to something else, to some other form. She smiles, instead, to match the wryness of his tone. She should have known he would not mind a new scar, but the one that is left on her will not be forgotten so quickly.
He will leave again, she knows, now. He will leave.
But, Boudika supposes, all things do. And for the moment, she will not dwell on such an eventuality, on such a certainty. Instead, the world passes her by as rivers do to rocks; the city of Denocte begins to lay to rest, and fades from cityscape to seascape nearly within the blink of an eye.
Boudika is shy now where only moments ago she had been bold. She steals glances at him, marveling. For so long since he left she has felt not only alone, but separate. Even when others had met with her, Boudika had been different. The colors, brighter. The scents, stronger. Everything, vivid and demanding and sharp; and so she had been, too. What am I? she had asked so many nights to nothing but the stars and the sea. What am I? How did I become this? She had known, however—she had known that since she had first met him, a force—whether fate, or will, or destiny—had driven her to become and, yes, he was her Maker.
What does it mean, she wonders, to be Made?
They catch shy glances from one another; and when she plunges into the water, it is only to glance back and admire the way it turns to ice against him. He does not allow the space between them to exist for long, before his chest is pressed into her shoulder and his lips graze her ear. No. Though I hardly remember what it is to be otherwise.
Boudika turns her face into the wild tangles of his mane. She toys with a bit of bone and, with bright-eyed mischief, plucks a shell to weave into her own hair.
“I have never known anything else,” she admits, quietly. Her tone is nearly abashed.
But it is true. In Oresziah, it had always been a lie. It is the only way she can allow herself to think of it now: the depth of those relationships had been something other, often based on duty or necessity rather than attachment.
It causes Boudika to draw away, deeper into the sea. She beckons him with her eyes, until they stand chest-to-chest and shoulder deep in the waves. She asks, “Tell me about your people.” Tell me what it means to be one of them.
Boudika knows she is different, and her expression flits briefly with insecurity; she recovers, however, by saying hesitantly: “We are something new, together.”
this is who we were, before bones, before dirt, even before light
this untameable expanse, this blue mirror of god. this heaving,
churning proof that we have always been deep, restless souls.
RE: anyone's ghost; - Amaroq - 11-13-2020
amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
No ghosts were friendly - but all of them were useful. Not all teachers gave pleasant lessons, and the painful ones were the best remembered. And until Amaroq became a ghost himself, he would not forget what he’d learned from the encounter with the black-faced stranger. (Not that the basic fact was anything new - hatred of his kind, he has found, is universal).
It is both easy and strange to be affectionate with her. To nip at her jaw as the takes a shell from his mane (a cantharus banded in a brown so deep it is nearly indigo, taken from a beach years ago as his people dozed after a successful hunt). To flick his tail so that is sprays them both with seawater, cold enough to shock him further awake.
But at the softness of her voice he stills, his gaze falling from the glow of Denocte’s harbor lights like soft bright eyes to her own. His own solitude has long been one of circumstance - but Boudika’s is something else. She has not been alone (even now she smells of bonfires, of other people as much as the sea), but Amaroq does not doubt that she has been apart.
“There is nothing wrong in being different, Boudika,” he says, first his voice and his eyes following her as she moves away, watching the water cleave around her. The unicorn savors her name, the drumbeat of it, before he advances again to meet her skin-to-skin. Here it smells more of ocean than anything, cold and clean. Behind them the city is a soot-smelling memory, something to be washed away. Before them is open water, masked by fog.
His expression turns considering at her not-quite-question. It does not shift when she continues before he has time to respond, though his slow smile returns, beckoned by the word we.
“We are,” he echoes, then says, his breath making a fine lace of ice on the sea,“But you are also one of my people, now.”
And we are all that is left. He doesn’t say it, but perhaps she recognizes the look in her eyes. Perhaps her Orestes had worn the same one, before he changed.
But no wild thing can cling to past sorrows and live. They are too much a snare, an anchor, a thing to capture you or drown you. He doesn’t want Boudika to drown - and anyway it does not seem like her nature, not when she is a thing of fire, meant to dance like sparks and drift like smoke, light enough to be carried by the wind.
A big wave laps up, leaves a cold kiss at his throat. When he licks his lips they taste of salt. “My people are ancient. They used to say that the ice was born of the stars, and we were born of the ice. We traveled seasonally, as all things there must - following the food, the ice.” He does not look at her, now - he watches the faint whitecaps, ghosts through the fog. “But like any people, we were not a monolith. Some were serious, some liked to play, liked to laugh more than the gulls did. And all of them underestimated the land-horses.”
Amaroq looks back at her abruptly. If there is pain in his eyes, or rage, it is hidden behind other things, a gravestone too coated in frost to read. “Show me what you’ve learned, while I’ve been gone,” he tells her, and then, with a flash of a grin, at least dives below the surface.
@Boudika |
RE: anyone's ghost; - Boudika - 11-30-2020
T
here is nothing wrong in being different, Boudika. His eyes do to her what no other man’s have ever done. They unravel her. They bare her to the bone and, strangely, she feels seen. She feels felt, with each playful show of affection.
She wishes she could believe that so fluidly; as wildly, as he. But Boudika does not know if she ever will, raised as she was to be one of many interchangeable pieces. That was a soldier’s life. A pawn’s life. And she had always been different, and her differences had nearly destroyed her more than once—but here, with him, they feel like a strength. And for that Boudika is more thankful than she will ever be able to express.
We are. But you are also one of my people, now.
She smiles now, despite the expression in his eyes—she understands the severity of it, the weight placed upon her shoulders. And yet, it does not feel like a weight. “I am thankful for it. You have given me a purpose again, Amaroq.”
That is no easy thing, to instill in another.
She listens to him with appraising eyes; with hope, even. My people are ancient. They used to say that the ice was born of the stars and we were born of the ice.
Boudika feels the tragedy in his story; but the majestic beauty in it, as well. She wants to say that on her island, they had been the meeting of the land and sea, where the waters met the rocks of the cliffs. They had been brutal change. When he ends, and all of them underestimated the land horses her mind’s eye is painted with visions of her own war, with the way she cleaved life away as though it had been her right.
She is quiet—nearly demure. Because there are no words for this side of the story. No way to explain, in depth, the purpose he has instilled in her is a way to right her wrongs, to seek penance for her sins. To bring back something that had been lost.
“You and I know better,” she whispers, her nose pressed into his cheek as he stares toward the whitecaps in the distance. But then the severity of their conversation disappears; he returns to an aura of courtship and challenges her.
Rather than remain entrapped in the sorrows of the past, Boudika flashes a wicked grin. It does not take long for her to delve into the sea after him.
this is who we were, before bones, before dirt, even before light
this untameable expanse, this blue mirror of god. this heaving,
churning proof that we have always been deep, restless souls.