[AW] just the color, just the shape;

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind He waits within the thrashing sea.  Amaroq is a shadow in the deeper colors of the night, almost invisible against the whitecaps that race to thrust themselves against the shore. The silver flecks across his withers might be nothing more than moonlight, his pale hair only trailing eelgrass far beneath the surface.  The hunger in his eyes is the liveliest thing about him. But for it he might be flotsam washed from some distant wreck, unremarkable. Except, that is, for the wrongness of his color, and the frigid sea around him when all the saltwater should be warm with summer. There is no mistaking him in this landscape, as unnatural as a polar bear in a pine forest. That is why he waits well beyond the breakers.  He has been watching the citadel. Amaroq has never seen anything like it, those sheer walls of bleached stone, set with lanterns like eyes aglow. He has never seen anything like the scale of the docks, the number of horses and the clamor they make. He wonders how soft they are.  For now they are too many, and he alone, weary and thin from his weeks of swimming. There had been no moonlight when he began; the ice was thin and splintered and the sun did not set for days. Now there are stars above him again, cold as the pinpricks of his eyes, unblinking as he dips below the surface smooth as a seal and vanishes from view.  It is cool beneath the waves. In the darkness of the summer sea he returns to the island south of the city, where he has made his temporary home. It is thick with silver-barked oak and they watch like sentinels as he steps from the sea, streaming with water, his breath spilling cold silver into the air. His horn juts from his brow like a mast of bone.  Amaroq paces like a tiger down the shore, his prints crackling into frost and rime on the sand. His tail lashes behind him, and his eyes do not leave the shining city on the distant shore.  ooc: to any interested he's on the big island south of Denocte here map! amaroq