Snow dusts the rooflines, and the thin sunlight turns everything to old gold and ancient diamonds. It’s a cold day for this early in the season, enough that even the raven’s breath is visible, as are all the prayers of the monks in their mountain monastery. In the low streets near the markets and docks all the little dragons are curled atop stoves, dreaming of warm food and warm days.
And what is Amaroq, in this slumbering story, but the wolf that waits outside the door?
Today the sleepers need not fear him. Today he prowls far from the city, where the forests of shaggy pine march right up to the coast, and the only beaches are hidden coves with pebbles like teeth and driftwood like bones, buried in fog. He is hungry, but not enough to hunt; there are deer and elk in the forest, and seals in the sea, but their big dark eyes do not watch him pass. Today he is nothing but another unicorn, and when is a unicorn something for a wild thing to fear?
Half of my soul loves the craggy forests and the pines that lean more towards the horizon than they do the sun. That part of me loves the mix of damp loam and the predator musk that lingers on my tongue like stolen drams and bottles of wine. There is death in the forest here, and life, and things that turn the edges of my wolf into snow, and muscle, and tendon as his insides beg to come out (and his belly begs to devour the world). I could be happy here where the dead world runs into the eternal sea.
I could be home.
But then there is the half of me that loves the waves, and the storm, and the taste of froth leaving crystals of salt on my lips like it's spun sugar instead of sea. I love the roar in my ears that makes my heart stumble in my chest, I love the lighthearted feeling that makes my insides want to come out. It's darker than the love I have for my sister, for my wolf, for anything in the world that might be both attachment and chain.
It's darker. Like me it's almost black in the moonlight.
And the moonlight cannot reach me here beneath the sea-craving pines and the rotten trunk of trees the tidal wave killed. I am nothing more than a sliver of a girl in the darkness, a speck of gray half-dead star next to the bone-white shimmer of Foras. I am--
I am--
I am a unicorn with teeth that know nothing about innocence when I snarl as my wolf does at the unicorn stalking through the darkness that should belong to me and me alone.
here is a ripple of sound from the trees and then two fragments of moon-shine separate themselves from the darkness.
Amaroq falls still and so, too, do the bells and bones that chime soft notes from where they are wound in his pale hair. His horn points like a finger to the shadowed place beneath the rotting trunks, but his gaze is not accusatory but beckoning.
Such things as he see well in the darkness. Such things as he do not fear snarls from wolves or girl-children, not even wraith wolves, not even unicorns.
The air smells of saltwater and snow. It is difficult to know where the first comes from; the second is threatening in the clouds that crowd the horizon, and the ice crystals that ring the moon like an eye. Amaroq breathes out a long plume of vapor, and his eyes do not leave the wolf and the girl. There is a smile on his mouth but it is faint as a shadow from starlight, faint as the waterline on the dead pines.
The kelpie does not snarl back, but his voice is still as low as a growl when he says, almost tenderly, “Won’t you come out?”
And maybe he is thinking of the last unicorn he saw in a place where the air smelled of salt and brine, and winter frost kissed the grass, and a young beast guarded her and licked its teeth in want.
This, a meeting of two monsters in the winter-woods, sits in my soul like law etched into marble. The curl of a lips, the flash of a fang, the snarl and the spit of creatures driven by hunger and need. His language, older perhaps, is no different than mine and my wolf's. We are gods in this language as dead things are to the lotus flowers and the carrion birds.
We are masters of it. By want of war and knowledge of it we are masters (and masterpiece makers) of this dark-woods and all the monsters pretending ownership of it.
I smile when he answers with both the language of man and the sounds of beasts. There is a wave fat with ice in his growl and seaweed tangled between his words. But I am winter, and the taken-by-the-sea-girl, and I rest by head by a wolf who turns his insides out instead of growling, and I there is more than a wave in my voice. There is a distant tidal roar, a whisper of bone caught in the surf, a winter-middle instead of winter-start. “Do you think it wise,” I unfold from the moonlight in the same way my mother once did, “for the hunter to taunt the wolves to leave their own den, in their forest, in which the hunter is nothing more than an interloper?”
And perhaps he was foolish enough to think me a thing hiding in the dark forest, a wraith instead of the ruination of the ghosts. Perhaps he did not listen to the war in my steps and the hunger gurgling like a brook in my belly. Or perhaps he heard all those things as we approached each other in the gloaming with brine on our lashes like snowflakes. Perhaps he thinks himself wolf instead of hunter.
I laugh, into the darkness like a falling star, as I move close enough to count the speaks of color on his pale belly (and hip, and neck). My memories draw constellations between the darker stains and my hunger tells me to connect them with lines of blood instead of light. And I almost ask him if he wants to be sword, or dragon, or mortal, by the grace of my creativity.
I almost ask him a hundred different questions as I raise my horn to tap a note of warning against his while Foras finishes becoming the vision of the monster that lives waiting, and ravenous, inside my bones. Instead I ask him nothing else with our horns resting against each other on a battle-field (like we are waiting only for the drums to start their song).
Into the darkness, blacker where his shadow falls against my lips, I smile.
hat smile of his doesn’t waver as the girl answers back, no matter the gale in her voice. All his life he’s learned the sound of warnings, and which he must take heed of, and which he can ignore, and which he can provoke.
“Am I the hunter?” he asks, all innocence, a killer whale with its belly well full.
There are other things he thinks to say - I thought this forest belonged to the queen, for one - but as he watches her come forward from her cover, he only adds, “The wisdom of my kind is different from yours.” And that is when his smile fades, for he, too, is thinking of war; even as his pale eyes study her movements he thinks she is like one of the spears of the northern people, crafted from bits of fallen star, gleaming silver and sharper and truer than ice.
Oh, but her eyes are dark, the sea beneath the new moon. And she is not smiling at all - her mouth is a slash like a black crevasse, her wolf is becoming a monster (for this he spares a quick glance, and measures the distance of the sea from his back), and then she is before him, all bold, and her horn falls like the flat of a sword against the bone of his.
That is when she smiles.
And Amaroq’s mouth stretches wider, until it is almost a grin, until it shows a promise of teeth. It covers his surprise. They stand in the moonlight, silver beacons in the fog, and the sea breathes beyond them in the mist, and ice groans as it grows from his horn all along her own, reaching for her brow, reaching for the stars unfeeling above them.
“Unless,” he says softly, and his breath is white mist against her throat, “you are like me.”
It is almost a question - one it pains him too much to ask in full.
Of course my teeth are the first pieces of me to answer him. They gleam and gloam like stars in the dark fridigness of space. But my teeth are no promise, no mere hint of a monster sleeping in unicorn bones. No. My teeth are nothing like his when I peel back my lips to make them more than a promise.
My smile is not a promise. My smile is the holy scripture of violence.
His frost cools the fever in my blood. I become the winter sea instead of the summer, blood sea. And I wonder if he will willingly dash his heart on the ice of me. I lean into the frost and blink the snow from my lashes as it gathers there when I drag my horn down the length of his. Our horns moan and screech and I wonder if I am just as lovely made of ice as I am made of flesh.
Foras steps closer. In this form he is a god of winter, a wolf of the mountain peaks, a thing that wants to drink deep, deep, deep of the sea-god that stole half my soul from him. He smells like the bottom of the sea. He tells me even though he knows I already know.
Foras hates the sea as much as my half-gone soul loves it.
This unicorn surely is smart enough, old enough, to read the words of our religion.. “A hunter might ask that same question of a wolf snapping his teeth at his throat.”. The scripture of my violence curls around itself in all the same ways Foras’s outsides curl around his insides. Can he see it in my gaze? Or can he sense it when I drag the point of my horn back to the point of his?
I whisper, wake up to the diamond dust of his frost that’s gathered on my cheeks. It rises from my skin in pale whispers of winter that pause just under my eyes like arrows begging entrance. “I am better.” And when I say the words his own frost spirals back to the point at which our two horns meet.
he sound their horns make together carries him home, a home that is far away, and long ago, and gone. But he carries the ghost of it as their weapons clack like autumn stags’, like the tusks of narwhals below the aurora with their breath steaming above them. And that sound of challenge is enough to warm his blood, to shake him from the winter dream he lives in.
His tail twines, sinuous, an arc toward the wolf like a hand ordering a dog to sit, be still. A wolf does not wonder if a coyote will leap for its throat, and Amaroq keeps his focus on the girl, wild thing she is, the color of angry ocean froth streaked with blue from well below the surface. He can smell the saltwater in her clearly, now, and if she were older he might feel threatened - or something else, something as ancient - but she is not.
I am better, she says, and by some magic sends his ice where he did not ask it to go.
Swift as any toothsome thing striking prey, Amaroq knocks his skull against hers in an impact hard enough to make his vision flash white. Even as it fades his lips are peeling back, teeth as pearl-white and sharp as hers in jaws that have killed many more than her youth can claim.
Just for a moment they reach for her throat - until he withdraws enough to regard her with a gaze holding all the impersonal hostility of winter. “I forgive your arrogance as youth,” he says, and his breath now is cold enough itself to bite. "But only once."
Foras has not shifted, or at least not fully, since the war. Here in this tame world parts of him have only suggested violence and winter. And I have forgotten, as all dead things forget, how grotesque my beloved wolf can become. But I remember now. Oh I remember now.
Perhaps I was wrong to think of us, me and this old thing, as unicorns and wolves. Perhaps I was terribly wrong. For there is nothing like Foras in my snarling mouth full of fangs when the stallion slams into my head. I do not growl when my vision flashes back. I do not froth and foam with rage when he warns me as a million men have tried to warn me before (and when I tore their tongues from their mouth I found that I enjoyed the sounds of their warnings when they turned to bleating lambs).
My vision lingers in the black for longer than it should and I know like all things from war know, that my time to kill him is unspooling like thread.
I recall, as I hear my wolf’s bones snap and shift like a hundred stones rolling down the mountains, the last time a man raised his sword at the curl of my throat. I remember when he told me you are too pretty and young to die in war. I remember the leering way he licked his teeth and straightened a noble’s crown upon his brow.
I remember now how I did not laugh or spit insults. I said nothing at all to him when I smiled like a dainty thing only just realizing that she was knee deep in blood. And I made no sound when I let his sword scrape along my neck just so that I could get closer, and closer, to those leering black eyes.
I let Foras eat his corpse. I let him eat him right there in the middle of the killing field. I did not make him wait.
My vision grows darker still with white flashing warnings spidering across the black. I know that my last thread of this moment has gone from foot to inch. Sometimes I forget that I am a dead but mortal thing. I forget that I can still die.
But I know I’m not dying now, only stumbling through the sheer brutality of his hit. Still I am aware enough, enraged enough, to spit blood out of my mouth where I bit my own cheek. I will not be sorry when I wash the blood from my monster’s fur in the sea. And like before I do not laugh as an old thing tells me what I should be.
My voice is a wavering and terrible sort of clear when I cut my wolf free of the frail leash I hold him with , “Eat him.”
Foras needs no permission though, he did not need it the moment the stallion slammed his skull into mine. He tilts his head, now more sinew than fur, and brays to the moon for blood. His body, now so much larger than mine, is leaping for the stallion’s spine before his howling cry ends. The stallion really should not have hit me so hard, Foras might have forgiven him in the same way he forgives me. Might have.
In the darkness of my clearing vision I watch as Foras becomes the beast of battle, that with a dragon, won a war.
he girl-unicorn, savage thing she is, does not learn well. In the background - loud enough, strange enough now to draw Amaroq’s eye - her companion is transforming. The stallion doesn’t know whether the wolf is becoming or being unmade; there is only the furious sound of its snarling, the unnatural splintering of bones that multiply and lengthen, pale magic crawling over him like hoarfrost.
Eat him, the girl says, and Amaroq’s eyes are as hard, as cold, as the wall of an iceberg jutting above the ruinous black sea. For a moment - for a heartbeat, as the girl spits blood and the thing-that-was-a-wolf throws back its head to howl, the kelpie considers running her through. How long has it been, since his horn was more than decoration and warning? How long since it was consecrated?
But he knows that if he did - if he took the time - he would die. And he is not ready for that, not at the jaws of some pet beast. In the next half-breath he is turning, gnashing his teeth even as he springs with the snow flying up from his heels and the wolf following after. It is not his nature to flee. But it is to survive, and he is no fool to not realize when he is outmatched.
And oh, he is. Behind him, limned by moonlight, the beast leaps. Amaroq, running for the shore and the quiet surf beyond, calls up his magic, coating his skin in a crust of ice thick as armor, and even so the wolf’s claws and the force of his leap cut through, making the ice shriek like scraped glass, raking Amaroq’s hindquarters beneath. The kelpie kicks hard and continues to run, and inside he is howling too, even as his breath comes harsh between his jaws and the ice regrows over his skin.
Then he is at the beach, in the waves, knee-high, chest-high, chin-high and gone, down where no wolf could follow, and no girl would dare.
In my monster’s eyes I do not feel pain but only see the millions of ways that we (that I) might cause it. Each shard of moonlight looks like a million caught stars reflecting on the ghosts cast up in the sea mist. The sand, and spit, flying into the moonlight as we hunt glimmer more like blood than bits of earth and wolf.
In my monster’s mouth I can taste the brine of the unicorn’s sweat and ice as she runs. I can taste the sweetness of ice that to anyone else, anything else, might have tasted like salt instead of sugar spun. We have forgotten the taste, the flavor, the euphoria, of all the things that come before the hunt when the lamb’s bellies are still whole.
Novus has made us tame-- tame enough that we talk to mean instead of devour them by sight and sight alone.
But I have been corrected, we have been corrected, and now (now!) we will not forget again. And perhaps I understand the brutality of mother more than I had before, as I watch the stallion run into the sea as it will save him.
Tomorrow I’ll ask Fable to take me swimming. Tomorrow I’ll ask him to hunt with me. Tomorrow I’ll hunt as a young unicorn and not a wolf.
Tonight though, as my Wolf froths and foams at the tide, as he licks the taste of the stallion from his lips and his claws, I will remember each way I saw to cause pain. I will remember how to felt to run, and bray, and take flesh between my jaws and bite down.
Tonight I will, because the darkness is starting to thicken to oil, dream of vengeance and a hundred needles of pain that are not my own.
