At the edge of the sea there rumbles something like promise, cold and wet and dark.
And Marisol’s white-and-shadow wings are freckled with saltwater, her short hair tousled by the wind, tail tangled against her legs, but she does not seem to mind; in the chill and the dusk she trudges toward the shore with her head ducked low and gray eyes brightly watchful, casting moonlight on the grass beneath her feet. Behind her, Denocte’s inner city glimmers with warm light. But it is almost completely obscured by the distance she’s put between herself and the township, and the fact that she is careful to keep her eyes ahead of her, on the grass-and-gravel path and not the civilization at her back.
She does not think - or tries not to - of the ghost of Isra’s kiss on her cheek, dirty and sweet. She does not listen - or tries not to - to the low, glacé whine of music from the citadel, still following after her, like a ghost. And she especially does not feel (or tries not to) the way her heart dances, rough and criminal, against the inside of her chest, thrashing and biting like a wild thing.
At the edge of the cliff, Marisol comes to a short stop. She flares her wings out a little against the sea breeze. Hundreds of feet below her, past the sharp-steep drop of the cliff crumbling away at her hooves, the ocean roils and churns in a foaming mass, spitting up bits of salt and seaweed high into the air. Mari peers down at it and wonders if she is already living in a world in which violence equals power, and then wonders, a moment after, if she is destined to live in a world like that anyway.
Absent-mindedly, she knocks the butt of her spear against her leg, like a drumbeat.
usk finds him a shadow beneath the surface of the sea, hunting.
Finding prey is easy, here; the creatures of the sea are unused to such as him, near enough to shore that it is too shallow for the whales and other predators of the deep. Patience rewards him with a harbor seal, young and foolish and far too brave, who sought to touch a unicorn. For his recklessness he won a quick and bloody death.
Though not his preference, Amaroq makes quick work of his meal at sea, and leaves the rest for the fish and seagulls, who berate him in throaty voices as they gather like flies above. He grins at their pretend outrage, knowing well they are as hungry for meat as he - and then he makes his way carefully, carefully to the cliffside.
Oh, he wishes for sea-ice as he rides the tide inland, with the crashing of churning water against ancient rock echoing in his ears. But it is a summer-sea still, and even his magic is no use to him here, with the saltwater warm around him.
So deliberately, delicately, he navigates the waves, drifting inland with only his head and the spiral of his horn above the water. When the water sighs back before another rush, when the rocks are stacked before him crusted with barnacles and salt, he pulls himself up and out of the sea and shakes himself like a wolf or a bear. And then he picks his way among the rocks and little tide-pools, the deep clefts and the driftwood, until he reaches a wide platform of granite a few feet above the highest tide.
The sun is near to setting, now, the whole sea the deep color of a new-cut jewel.
The kelpie glances up at the cliffline, knowing he is unable to see even the glow of the city from here - but still Amaroq is compelled to look. There is nothing but an unbroken line of rock, and ragged clouds above - and then a shape. Wide, bright wings, a dark face and chest; it is hard to tell, in the growing dim, if they are looking at him as well. But if they are he is unmissable: pale throat exposed, hair like a shroud of snow, blood on his chest and on his face like paint.
As the waves dash themselves to foam against his rock, the kelpie dips his horn like a knight’s sword to the figure that stands so high above him. It is a mockery, or a greeting, or a dare.
When she sees him climb onto the rocks, her first instinct is save.
Her jaw clenches. Wind stirs her dark hair into a frenzy. He must be freezing - even in summer, the sea here roils like a wild thing and does not answer to the call of the sun - she can see the salt and the water dripping from his skin, and after a moment of looking the artful spatter of blood across his chest - and the commander part of her (all of her, maybe) feels the instant urge to fly down and save him.
But as she watches, she realizes he is not shivering. There is no injury on any part of him. The blood that paints him cannot be his. And what was once pity, or concern, curdles in her chest and turns to a violent kind of distrust, clutching at her throat like a claw.
It does not seem real, the way he stands against the sapphire sea, all gray and red like a statue come to life; Marisol has always discounted stories of ocean-horses (with their sharp teeth and dark eyes) as a fairytale, but when she looks down at him over the steep drop off the cliff she thinks that she must be stupid not to have heeded the warnings in those stories, and even stupider to have taken this long to realize.
She begins to unwind the spear from where it lays wrapped against her back leg.
And when he raises his horn at her, like a knife, like an offering, she is glad - like a secret, like a promise - that she was not so foolish as to leave the citadel without a sharpened blade.
Evening, Marisol calls down. There is no way to know whether it reaches him or is lost somewhere between the cliff’s crags and the ghostly threads of fog, unspooling ever-quicker over the new-blue of the ocean. But her voice - raw and deep and dark - has always been a powerful thing, and even if he cannot hear it, there is no way he cannot notice the way she leans deeper over the edge of the cliff, and the mercurial glint of her grey eyes as they catch his.
e should be glad, perhaps, that the stranger far above him did not take the bait. The kelpie is still too new to make a target of himself, too new to tempt these horses who lived in cities like beehives, with their fires and their music and their weapons.
But although he is sated with blubber and blood there is a different kind of hunger still in him, and it clambers to be fed no less loudly. Amaroq was not made to be so long alone.
The wind snags her greeting, tumbles it on the currents of air like a scrap of fabric. When it reaches him he smiles (he does not show his teeth). The pale underside of her wings puts him in mind of new snow; her eyes are bright against the dark of her face with the last of the day’s light reflected off the surface of the sea. Come down, he wants to call to her, aren’t you curious? But he does not trust his voice to reach her, not with the sea rushing up against the rocks and the gulls and cormorants shrieking as they settle along the cliffs for the night.
Instead he only exhales, a stream of vapor strange in the summer night, and gestures again with the ivory spiral of his horn. You’re the one with wings, says the raise of his brows, and his seafoam-colored tail twines behind him against the dark slate of the stone he stands on.
Oh, but his eyes and the arch of his neck ask a different question, loud as his voice would be if he willed it, loud as an iceberg shearing.
She does not want to want him, but she does. Curiosity rises in her like a current. Foolish girl - for all her military poise Marisol’s heart is still as soft as a girl’s where it beats against her ribs, and when she sees him smile (or thinks she sees it - it could be a mirage) she smiles too, just a little bit, in wonderment. The flash of her teeth is too small to be predatory. And this, though she cannot know it, may be a fault.
Mari buckles the flat of her wings against the sea-wind and leans forward, again, bracing her legs tight as she can on the slick rock. A bird rushes past her in a flurry of feathers and she envies him for his weightlessness.
Over the edge of the cliff, her gray gaze watches and watches and watches. She has become good at assessing threats, especially in the last few years, and is disciplined enough to watch him like she would a ticking time bomb or a sharpened blade - catching on every edge, vigilant, watchful. He blends in easily with the dark waves and the darker rock. He is no delicate thing, either, tall against the backdrop of the sea, and muscles, and flecked with camouflage both light and dark. And if she didn’t know any better she would think he was beautiful.
But she does know better, and does not think of beauty but of the birds in Terrastella that blend into the trees with their mottled black-brown feathers, and how they are never wanting for something to eat.
For all her suspicion, still Marisol does not pull away. Instead she gasps in a breath full of salt and tentatively, carefully, presses the round edge of a hoof to the slope of the cliff, as if she is contemplating making the trek down.
Steep, she remarks, mostly to herself. Then louder, down to the edge of the ocean: Aren’t you cold?
It is impossible to tell if the glint in her eyes is suppressed mirth or cold calculation, or a mix; either way he cannot see it, not from all the way down there.
Of course it not the same. His is not quite a man’s wanting, or even a wolf’s - it is a combination of both and something more, that ancient urge to play god. Not just to destroy and consume but to Make.
He looks at her up on the cliffside and thinks I could make her like me.
But when she leans further yet out toward the thrashing sea he catches the glint of the spear beside her, rising like a savage peak. Then Amaroq lashes his tail, and remembers that while some horses are to be Made, some are only prey, and some are hunters, too.
“Don’t slip,” he says in answer, his voice echoing deep as a glacier against the rock, and shows his teeth at the question that follows in what might pass as a grin, from that far away. ”Never.” As if to echo him (though of course only because the sea is steady as a heartbeat) another wave breaks on his rock in a cool kiss. The foam that flecks his fetlocks then looks not so different as the underside of her wings, pale as lace with the black wet rock beneath. It is dark enough now that is almost all he can see of her, but for the gleam of her eyes. She is too far to see the way the thin remnants of saltwater freeze and shatter like fragile mirrors.
Lucky thing for her his magic isn’t stronger - because he wonders whether he could freeze the moisture in her throat, if only she were nearer. What it might be like, to flex his magic like a hand around her throat - or like jaws.
Don’t slip. She won’t. The suggestion of it makes her teeth itch. She stamps a hoof into the edge of the rock, as if to test the bearing of her strength, and though it does not even tremble, she scrapes her weight back an inch and shifts away from the margin of the ledge. White foam spits freckles onto the sly dark slope of her narrow shoulder, and she brushes it off with a pale wingtip as easy as breathing.
His teeth make a moon against the dark grey of his jaw, the black of the wet rock behind him, and Mari’s pulse catches for a millisecond as she looks at them: sly and sharp and too-too white, like a bone that knows, intimately, the sun. Blood still taints the water sloughing off his dark legs. And for all her pale fear the warrior in Marisol still respects him, more, even, than she might have without, for the acute edges of his shark’s smile.
She watches the serpentine slash of his tail move through the air with a white-hot concentration. Wind swirls its fingers through the short, dark swaths of Mari’s cut hair and turns it into a wash of faint curls, cemented by salt.
Well, she says, unsure of what else they could possibly talk about. That’s strange. I’ll leave you to it. But she does not walk away. She does not even move, not really, except for an infinitesimal lean backward, muscles working under her skin to freeze in place. For all her fear - not as intense as it should be, really - she is not quite afraid enough to leave, not when fear is the only thing that has ever kept her going.
e had wondered what sort of bird she was - eagle or gull or shy, sweet dove - but she does not easily fit into the things he knows. It whets his curiosity, and it might have been enough to send him picking a path up the rocky cliffside to find out if his other appetites were not so recently sated.
Amaroq has seen curiosity lead to death, as surely as arrogance, as surely as ignorance.
This time he does smile, when she speaks, another neat row of too-sharp teeth. The unicorn leans forward, still watching her, as the wind buffets his back warm off the sea; he wonders if it carries his scent to her, or if all she smells is blood and salt.
And still she watches him, her short main tousled by the wind, so little of her visible in the fading light. Come down, he wants to ask, wants to demand - but she is a bird and he is wolf and the blood is beginning to dry and itch on the snowy pale of his chest. Beckoning, too, is the cool dark of the seabed, the quiet tug of the tides.
“Sleep well,” he calls up to her, as the final seam of light at the horizon begins to go pewter and black-violet. But Amaroq does not want her to sleep well. He wants her to toss in her slumber, wants her sweat-slick and dreaming, dreaming of pale men by the sea who would beckon her away to wonders untold if only she would leave her perch.
He drops his head and his horn dips like a saber in salute. And then he turns upon his foam-specked rock and dives, an arc of muscle and grace like a moonbeam before he is gone and the waters of the sea close ravenous over his head.
@Marisol | shitty closer but let's do this again soon eh
![[Image: ddg6quy-9d15dab5-339c-4b09-8b57-20a99fda...jvUop12efQ]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/c175b84a-409b-40aa-8b86-49ed65b989ee/ddg6quy-9d15dab5-339c-4b09-8b57-20a99fda550e.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcL2MxNzViODRhLTQwOWItNDBhYS04Yjg2LTQ5ZWQ2NWI5ODllZVwvZGRnNnF1eS05ZDE1ZGFiNS0zMzljLTRiMDktOGI1Ny0yMGE5OWZkYTU1MGUucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.j-t9RuUsmMyaVL-O1rvZqbyyPYdOvtjHLjvUop12efQ)
