[AW] hymns of salt and terror;

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind For many days Amaroq keeps to the sea.  Like a seal he spends the daylight hours idling in the shallows, occasionally diving deep to twine himself in the kelp, to wander across the seagrass without touching a hoof to the ocean bed. Only once the sun has set does he drift in with the tide, surging pale and quick as a wave and fading like a glimmer of moonlight into the forest to hunt.  Though he loves the moonlight hours, though he suffers under the hot glare of the summer sun this far from his frigid home, it eats at the kelpie that it must be so. He should not be the one in hiding. But this place is still too new to him, and Amaroq can be as patient as a glacier until he understands if there is danger, and where it lies.  It is a rare day that drives him further inland at last.  A summer storm has swept in from the sea, a wailing wind that lashes the waves up against the coast. If it were not for the rain that came along with it Amaroq might have kept to the depths, but the downpour is cool against his shoulders and along his back as he stands amid the stones of shore, and he is ready to taste something other than salt on his tongue.  There is no sound but the rain against the leaves as he disappears into the darkness of the forest, the air heavy with the smell of brine and petrichor and pine. He moves pale as a ghost beneath their boughs, silver as the rain and white as the foam of the waves. Despite the cool rain on his back, frost draws patterns on his skin, and his breath is a mist.  No part of him blends in here, and yet he hunts.  His prey do not know he is a predator; they smell only a horse, and only the sea. The saltwater washes the blood from his skin like a mother’s tongue. To the hare and the foxes and the deer he is only another unicorn -  and oh, how the beasts of the forest love unicorns.  So he can already taste the copper on his tongue when a doe crosses his path. She pauses midstep, uncertain in the rain, and turns her dark and liquid eyes on him. Amaroq arches his neck like a prince; the tip of his horn dips graceful as a saber. Her wariness falters, and she flicks her large ears at him. Between them, in the little current of rainwater washing back to the sea, ice begins to form filaments like pale cracks.  “Come,” he says in a voice like new snow, “let me see you,” and she bobs her head but takes a step toward him. Still Amaroq does not smile, but regards her with his pale and empty eyes, and she halves the distance that separates them. Oh, he is ravenous now, and his teeth are sharp as he runs his tongue across them, waiting, patient. She is near enough he can make out her eyelashes, even in the rain. Overhead the wind is moaning still and if they had shadows they would soon meet -  There is a crackling of limbs, the snap of a branch. The doe flinches and bounds away, her tail a flag behind her, never looking back with those dark-moon eyes, and Amaroq snarls like thunder and lashes his tail even as he turns toward the source of the noise.  A figure stands there, equine, dark with the rain and the shadow of the trees. Though frustration and hunger flex leonine claws within him he only stands, silent and pale, as ice crackles around his feet.  @Euryale if you want, otherwise open! amaroq