In the shallows, a jade-eyed kelpie plays among the forest. She darts to and fro between the curtains of green, chasing after harbor seals and rockfish for no reason other than the sheer fun of it.
There was nothing like this where she was from. There was almost nothing at all but open space in every direction. It was the opposite of claustrophobia, but no less maddening for the uninitiated– and then you had the immense, bone-crunching pressure on the body and a blue so dark it almost seemed red. (or was that just the hunger coloring one’s vision? It was hard to tell, down there where Hunger was a religion.)
This was an entirely different world. One could get a true sense of their speed, when there were landmarks by which to measure distance traveled. So Anandi speeds along with powerful undulations of her long tail, front hooves tucked delicately to her chest (they were always in her way, but not as practical to remove as her mane) and among the kelp forest she learns how fast she can be, how agile. With only herself to race, she is always the winner. She laughs, so many bubbles, and fish dart away in fear at the sound. It makes her laugh even more.
It was usually easy to forget that beneath all that responsibility and maturity and hunger was just a girl. But not today. Today she is a child. Today she is–
Anandi sees the man with eyes like ice just in time to avoid colliding with him. She pulls up and rolls to the side, and though she should run run run while she has surprise on her side, she stops and turns to look at him. The child in her is gone the instant she sees the magnificent horn that spirals from his forehead (overcompensating much?) ending in a sharpened point. In the course of a split second, everything about her is different. Her face grows guarded and her lips tighten. Tension fills her body as she debates whether it is better to stand her ground or run, to charm or antagonize, seduce or repulse.
Her white forelock floats weightlessly around her like a halo. (The rest of her mane is cropped or tied particularly for this reason; she could never stand hair in her face, despite how wonderfully dramatic it could look. It was one of the few cases in which she chose practicality over vanity.) She must duck down to clear the hair from her vision, and once more their eyes lock. He looks positively villainous. She thinks she might be scared.
But she's never seen anything like him and she isn't ready to look away.
The girl stares at the menacing stranger with huge expressive eyes, ears and frond tilted back uncertainly. You wouldn’t eat me– would you? And then there is another change in her. Perhaps she is remembering that she is a princess, and she has sharp things too. She smiles, or more accurately she bares her teeth. You wouldn't dare try.
(right?)
A N A N D I Like a deep woman, the sea hid a good deal; it had many faces, many delicate, terrible veils. It spoke of miracles and distances; if it could court, it could also kill.
In silence he hunts among the kelp forest. Green towers upwards, more ancient than trees, swaying in the current that (unlike a breeze) never falls still. Light shatters at the surface and fragments down, painting everything it can reach. There are no tracks here by which to find what he hunts, but the kelpie knows that the otters have all climbed up among the rocks, that the small round seals have heaved themselves to shore the way they would before an orca.
It frustrates him that he cannot hunt on the surface, that watchful eyes comb the beach for a glimpse of his horn jutting proud among the breakers. He has seen the pegasi passing over, their shadows skimming the water like gulls; how he wishes they were as easy to pluck the feathers from. How he wishes the dark-skinned girl would come back, that he could teach her to hunt, that he could ask her Are you not improved? Are you not happier? He has opened up worlds to her, above and below the surface of the water, the surface of her skin. There is nowhere she cannot go with her wings and her water-gift - unless her people put her down.
But that is not his concern. She will learn the law or she will die, and it is not for Amaroq to determine whether she seizes the world between her jaws and lives.
There is laughter beneath the water. The kelplie twines, stalking the forest like a wolf, tracking that stream of bubbles, that flash of silver like a fish. There is movement unceasing, but when he turns there is nothing but kelp and minnows that scatter like starlings for the shadows.
And then! Before he can whirl she is there, collision-close, and he is sitting back on his haunches in the water, he is breathing a stream of bubbles, he is staring narrow-eyed and oh his teeth are sharp.
They observe one another, the hunters. Her eyes are a green that has no place in his world, a green seen only in the curtains of light that shimmer above the frigid expanse of sea-ice and black water, doorway to the gods-water where the dead and holy swim among the stars. Her hair is a halo and his is a shroud, and he wonders are we alike, you and I?
She shows her teeth, and so does Amaroq: a grin like the drawing of a blade. She is young, wide-eyed, like and not like. Already he can tell she was born, and not made; he watches her expression shift as easily as the wind disturbing the water’s surface and still he does not turn his gaze away.
At last, slowly, he inclines his head, dipping the bone-pale spiral of his horn with all the easy grace of a prince’s bow. All the while his eyes do not leave her, measuring, curious. His gaze says I will not chase you if you do not run.
He waits for her to choose, and tries and fails to remember what it’s like, to not be alone.
She learned that on the surface they called the sea Terminus. Like it was the end of things and not the beginning. Of course, she understood why they might call it that. To them the sea meant only death. Sharks and jellyfish, angry tides and sharp rocks... and perhaps most dangerous of all, the call of the ocean. There were tales of men and women so enamored with the sea that at night, with only the moon as their witness, they walked into the water and were never seen again.
Poor landlings... they could never know how life thrived beneath the surface. What bounty lay just out of sight! Pods of dolphins that stretched to the horizon, shoals of fish that moved as though seized by a single mind. In the deep, massive creatures were born, lived, and died without ever feeling the light of the sun on their skin. (They could never see it, of course, because they lost sight eons ago). The depths of the ocean were beyond even Anandi's knowledge-- it would not be madness to imagine it was as deep as the sky, for both were without end to the known world.
(Sometimes she would peer into the night and wonder at how the stars glimmered like lanternfish did, back in the deep sea, in the depths beneath her. If she could swim deep enough, would she circle back to the stars? It did not seem impossible, sometimes, that there would be light on the other side of every darkness.)
Anandi feels the warm current that suspends her body. She feels her strength and agility triple, now that she is back in her element. Perhaps the horses were right, and as long as those like Amaroq and Anandi lived, the sea was only a terminus for them.
The kelpies lock eyes and flash teeth, the oldest of dances. Anandi knows she should be afraid. She is afraid. But the fear is like blood in the water, each second diluting into the rest of what runs through her mind- intrigue, mostly, but also bare-toothed pride. (Pride was a quality her people tried for generations to breed out of themselves-- but their efforts had the opposite effect, and her family's pride only grew consolidated and impenetrable, like a small stone that sat just before the heart of every Minn kelpie.) She also knew how fear might be the death of her here, where to flee would be
Wide-eyed and breathless with uncertain curiosity, she moves around the horned stranger like it's a game. Sometimes trees of kelp rise between them, carving him into bite-sized chunks of silver and blue and black, colors deep and rich like the fur of a seal. He was easier to look at then, for he was more familiar to her in bits and pieces instead of a whole, wild-eyed kelpie. (Was he one of the many clans that hunted her kind to near extinction, driving them to the twilight of the sea? He must be. He must be, and still she is not afraid.)
The graceful, circular movement draws Anandi slowly closer to the man that looks like death. Her eyes drink him in, every sharp angle and smooth line, every color of his skin a different shade of blue-green in the filtered sunlight. He is a creature of beautiful efficiency, not very much unlike herself. Although, over the years her kind's form had modified to emphasize the beautiful. Her curious eyes and lovely lips, lined in inky black to draw the gaze in, and the sheer expressiveness of her face, which could paradoxically convey childlike innocence and sinful knowing at the same time. It was not by chance that she was born with such features. Such talents. It was evolution, and she was the newest, shiniest model in a line of killers to whom, in the end, one would willingly bare their neck for the feast.
Finally her eyes return to his. She had almost forgotten what it felt like to be underwater with another. How intimate it could be, to share a space without a single word. She found her nose was so much sharper here, in her element. She could smell a drop of blood a mile away. She could certainly smell the oily meat of the kelpie before her, the danger of him like nothing she's ever tasted on the water. (They didn't get many visitors, down below.) Her own scent? Nuanced as all hell-- it could most succinctly be described as a flower with razor-edged petals.
Soon she drifts close enough to place her cheek alongside his horn and wonder how many things bled to death here, looking him in the eye.
Surely, none of them ever looked at him like she does now.
Anandi does not know for sure he won't end her right there and then, pierce her throat with a flick of the sword. (Can he hear her heart flutter with uncertainty? With terrible excitement?) She smiles, lazy and catlike. Like she knows something he does not-- maybe many things. Not even Anandi knows if she is bluffing anymore. And then she leans in to place a kiss on his cheek, just to see how he might react.
A N A N D I Like a deep woman, the sea hid a good deal; it had many faces, many delicate, terrible veils. It spoke of miracles and distances; if it could court, it could also kill.
There is a temptation, as they measure one another through the blue water, to flick his head, to lay open her cheek with the tip of his horn where the bone spirals into a deadly, marvelous point. It is not for boredom, or cruelty, or even curiosity - it is for the pride he sees there, the sleepy, knowing pride of a cat. It is not the nature of a wolf to share its habitat with a hunter who stalks the same prey. And how easy would it be for her to hunt, in her fashion, with a livid scar blooming along her cheek? Or without one of those grass-green eyes, brighter than anything here beneath the waves?
But Amaroq has enemies enough, above the water and below. It does not hurt to have another kelpie, another scapegoat for the walkers to suspect (he has seen the shadows too large to be birds skimming low over the water, he has kept to the secret coves and the open ocean to hunt his meals). More than this, it has been long and long since he swam with another like himself, and loneliness is its own kind of hunger, deeper than the want for blood.
He can hear the running of her heart, fast as the breakers that rush up to the shoreline only to melt away to nothing. He does not turn his ice-colored eye from her as she lays a kiss against his cheek, and he grins, too, wide and lazy, even as his own heart bounds like a wolf over the snow to be touched so intimately.
And then he lungs for her, swift as an eel, to lay his teeth against her throat. If he catches her (for with her fins she must be quicker than he, able to move like a shaft of sunlight through the deep) it is gentle as a dog soft-mouthed around a bird, a reminder and a warning, old as the hunt itself. I was here first. I am the alpha.
When he withdraws, though, and the strange shifting light illuminates the silver scars that make strange runes of his pelt, he is grinning again, still watching her, heedless of the fish that part around them and the forest of kelp that drifts and sways. But Amaroq is no fish, and he cannot stay forever below. Again he dips his head to her in invitation to follow, and then he is swimming for the surface, silver-blue light falling around his shoulders, his long pale hair trailing after him like a burial shroud.
It is too hot, too bright, and sunlight shatters on the water like it’s broken glass. But Amaroq lingers there, treading water with his powerful legs, content for a moment to breathe - and to see if the stranger is bold enough, curious enough, proud enough, to go after him still.
Anandi was not well acquainted with loneliness. Even here, leagues away from family and friends and home, even here in a world so different that distance took on a whole new meaning, she did not feel lonely in the way she expected to. Life in Novus was colorful and beautiful and easy, and she was too busy exploring it to feel homesick. But how many times, with her many new land friends, did she wish they could join her beneath the waves? Sometimes the only thing in the world she wanted was to dance once again with someone to the gentle pulse of the sea.
The light is blue-green and piercing. It glimmers, illusive, and dances across the skins of the two water horses. One delicate, long, lovely-- her very bones suggestive of the snap they would make as they broke. The other sharp, sleek, also, in his way, lovely-- in the way a wolf is lovely, even with its muzzle red with blood.
Anandi never learned how to run. She learned how to hunt, how to stalk and chase, even how to be submissive-- but only when to do so was opportune. So when he lunges for her, she does not even have the instinct to flee. He's upon her too easily and a keening wail, indignant, rises from Anandi with a flurry of bubbles. She bares her teeth, angry, and her eyes scream the world you know is changing fast, even as her heart trembles with fear. This would be such a stupid way to die, she was so stupid for playing this game with him, and yet--
She knows he won't bite. She knows. Because she was made for bigger and better things than dying on the whim of some shallow-water dog. Because her future is still ahead of her, clear and starlit and big, bigger than this stupid, primitive beast could even imagine. Because she really does believe that the world he knows is changing fast, she's here now, and she's going to change everything. But not if he bites down.
And he doesn't bite. She stares daggers into him, but remains docile in his grip until he lets go.
It would be a damn lie to say he wasn't beautiful. She takes a long moment just to watch him rise into the sun, the current playing with his silver mane and the light wrapping eagerly around his body. A mystery of scars carved into his thick flesh. Every inch of him sings of danger, of death. Every inch of her responds.
She should leave. This asshole doesn't deserve her company. But despite her better judgement she follows, forward and up, up and into the too-bright sunlight. Caught, like a pathetic fish on a line, and pretending she chose to bite into the hook that hid beneath the lure.
She breaks the surface with a very quiet splash. Gives him a long look with kohl-rimmed eyes. Anandi, for perhaps the first time in her life, doesn't know what to say. She doesn't know how to act, who to be, before this man. She still feels his teeth on her neck, and his horn pressed so softly to her cheek. "Hi," she says finally, voice licorice and salt and honey. She licks the sea water from her lips. "Who are you?" Like they don't already know each other in a manner more intimate than words could ever be.
A N A N D I Like a deep woman, the sea hid a good deal; it had many faces, many delicate, terrible veils. It spoke of miracles and distances; if it could court, it could also kill.
Here, with her head slick-wet like an anointing, the kelpie’s skin sparkles silver-white in the sun. Salt flakes on her lashes like snow, and the color of her eyes is far more vivid, as though beneath the surface it is only a hazy dream-version of itself.
It has been so long since he has seen another like himself.
Like, and not like at all - for she is far from his people of the star-strewn north. All they share is a hunger, and the kind of beauty that toes the line with savagery and makes their prey come nearer, and nearer yet. They do not have to wail, and play lost in the night; they do not have to sing. They will always be fed.
Her voice is slippery, low as an undertow. Amaroq does not alter his steady regard at her greeting, and for a long moment after her question the only answering voice belongs to the gulls.
At last he says, quietly, “I hunt these waters.” Vapor joins his words like they are little bits of ice fallen in the summer sea. The unicorn does not say a refugee, as he had to the queen with the sea-eyes of the city on the hill. It feels less true now than it had then. It is almost grudgingly that he adds, “My name is Amaroq.” His name is not a sacred thing to him, but he still wears it close as the tokens wound into his mane; it feels strange to part with it now, but no stranger than her neck must have felt with his teeth to it.
Above the water, he had yet to smile. But now he does, and it thaws the glacial edges of his cheeks, the chill of his eyes. It shows, too, the gleam of teeth, little jagged whitecaps against the black of his lips. Up here, they are near enough to shore that the air is humid and green-smelling. Amaroq is unabashed in his study of her, though he prefers the way she looks in world below the surface, the way the light colored her sinuous form like something from a dream.
“I’m glad you followed me. I would show you something.” He is harsh in the full light of day, clearly more a thing made for moonlight and underwater; it’s too easy now to see how sharp-edged he is, how alien. Yet all the predatory tension has gone, and when he glances at a flock of sandpipers with sunlight flashing off their wings he looks almost like any other unicorn.
His name is a brutal kind of delicacy. Each syllable snaps like a broken bone, between them marrow rising dense and delicious. It suits him, although she wonders if this was not a quality of the name but the man. He has a certain gravity to him that makes the world lean in and listen. Any name would curl up happily in his lap, submit itself to be his and his completely.
She’s jealous.
“I’m Anandi.”
Her name is a promise, or a herald. The rustle of tall grass as the snake winds through, its forked tongue tasting the air- a-nan-di- something from the deep. Something from the dark. She is just the first. Soon there will be many, and this Amaroq will curse the day he set his teeth on her pale, lovely neck. “You’re beautiful,” she says, because it was true, even if she might hate him. Maybe she liked the way he made her blood race in a way that was different from that of a huntress. Maybe she even loved, just a little bit, the way he made her feel taught as a bow, yearning for release. It was a beautiful thing, when the arrow so loved its target.
“Are you the one who turned the commander?” Anandi tilts her head, docile. The sunlight reflects off the water, glittering on her features like a strange and dangerous starscape. She licks her teeth to keep from asking what did it feel like, what did it taste like.
what kind of
sound
did she make?
Did she
… like it?
But the questions run through her eyes, hungry and wanting. Curious, so very curious. And so very unafraid.
She considers his proposal, uncertain. It would be quite unbecoming to follow this stranger anywhere. Not that anyone of interest was watching. It was also a matter of posterity, self preservation. She did not trust him.
But she also did not fear him. It was part arrogance, part stupidity, part nature. Part loneliness. Finally she nods, the gesture tiny and unpleased, although she cannot hide the excited curl at the edge of her lips. The girl so loved surprises. She dips below the surface, and peers at him expectantly through the halo of his long mane.
A N A N D I Like a deep woman, the sea hid a good deal; it had many faces, many delicate, terrible veils. It spoke of miracles and distances; if it could court, it could also kill.
Anandi, she names herself, and he glances at the silver underneath the water, where her body becomes sinuous and long, the eel’s tail that curved like notes of music through the kelp. An-an-di, sleek and silver little song, the trickle and laughter of a brook in your mouth. He nods, like they have exchanged small gifts, but when she calls him beautiful the only thing he does is look at her, long and sharp.
The beauty of them is nothing to Amaroq but a fact. A trait that helps them eat. And maybe his belly is sharpening with hunger now, for he turns his gaze away from her, back toward the bay, where there is a far clamor on the beach. His exhale is a plume of vapor that dissipates at her question.
“The commander?” he echoes, the word absent of all recognition. But he is picturing her already, the girl with the wings and the spear, the dark skin and the eyes as grey and flat as slate, the underside of her feathers like fresh-fallen snow. How well he remembers the smell of her, the iron taste of her blood as it mingled with salt in his mouth, the bruises she gave him as she fought, the white of her eyes, the foaming of the water. All of these things are in his eyes when he looks back at Anandi.
“She never said who she was. I asked her of herself and she told me she was a used pair of wings. A vessel for duty.” There is no regret in him; his tone is as even as an ice-floe, his features remote. Only when he smiles - small, and wicked regardless of intent with the glint of his teeth - does he look like anything other than a wolf with its ears cocked to listen to the wind. How well he remembers the disappointment he’d felt, when he spoke with her - the way her words rang hollow as a bell, echoing empty in her eyes. How he had despised her a little for her stubborn weakness. How even as his teeth closed on her in those first thrashing moments he wasn’t sure whether it was her death he wanted, or her birth.
“I disagreed,” he says simply. “I hope she has changed her mind.”
The kelpie watches Anandi nod, small and stiff, and he sees, too, the curve at the corner of her lips. When she goes under, he draws his lungs full of air and does the same.
This near to the surface the water is a warm embrace. He begins to swim at once, not looking at the rippling of light at the surface, not looking at the predator who trails him. Down and down he goes, angling toward the shoreline, where the cliffs cut deep and their shadows lean out over the sea and make everything cold and dark. The white of him is a beacon that fish and otters have learned to flee.
The black of rock rises up before them like the walls of Atlantis. In the rock there is a small round mouth, jagged with the teeth of stalactites, a vague blue tunnel in the dark. Amaroq doesn’t hesitate before swimming for it, and he begins to feel the burn of his breath in his lungs, the press of the water around him, the humming crackling singing of all the noises above and below. The ocean is not silent, as some believe.
For a moment the tunnel underwater is all blackness and he thinks it is what death must feel like, caught alone in the cold and the dark.
And then he is through, and his head is breaking the surface again, but it is no blue sky that unfolds above him (above them) but the alien glow of bioluminescent stars on the ceiling of a cave. There is light somewhere, bleeding in through the rock in tremulous shafts that shift as clouds pass over the sun far away. Water murmurs as it runs over stone and when he breathes in, deeply, greedy for air, it seems as though the cavern is breathing with him.
There is a passageway that disappears further beneath the cliffs, and it is this the kelpie studies as he pulls himself from the ocean and steps into the cathedral the sea has carved. He only turns when he hears Anandi behind him.
“I don’t know how far it goes.” His voice is soft, almost reverent. “But I know I am not the first to find it.”
@Anandi <3 hope this is ok! I feel like nothing actually happens in his posts haha
