[AW] just the color, just the shape;

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind There is a moment, as the unicorn mare’s attention is turned on her little dragon and the dragon’s is turned on him, that Amaroq grins. It is a private thing, a secret thing, a grin between two predators - ah, but it says I am the bigger of us. There are teeth in that grin, and they glisten like bleached coral beneath a full moon, like starlight on ice. But it is gone by the time she looks at him again, once she has quieted her pet. He is surprised when she nears. It has been long and long since he was approached by one of the land-horses, and again his heartbeat trips, wondering, wondering - ah, but he quiets it, he coats it with ice. She is not like him; it is clear when she comes near enough that he can smell her beneath the salt of the sea she wears like perfume. All the while his expression is remote, his mouth a path carved through a glacier, his eyes two chips of ice. He does not meet her smile with his own - either his real one or the one he wears for the benefit of horses who do not understand the saltwater in his blood or the need for copper-taste on his tongue. Amaroq does not take his eyes from her, now, and so he sees when she catches the glimpse of his fangs, and drinks like clear water the way her face changes, the way her body shifts like wind on water. Mine, she says, and this time Amaroq does smile, and surprises himself in the doing of it. It is the ferocity of her voice that coaxed it from him, the way she said it like a she-wolf defending her cub, and his tail stills its leonine swaying. “Yours?” he says, and lets his gaze stray to the city over her shoulder, shining like a beacon, like a dare, like a warning. “It looks very lovely, from here.” He still wears a smile, though it has gone thin - but his attention snaps back to her when what had been sand cracks below her feet. Slowly, slowly, he lifts his gaze from the black glass shattered below her, cut patterns like a witch’s divining, up and up from the chain wound round her leg to the sea-colored scales to her fierce eyes. His smile is gone by the time he meets that gaze again, and he is only a unicorn colored like a seal, far from home and alone. “I am a traveler,” he says softly, and tilts his head so that his horn is no longer pointing toward her, but toward the sea and the stars as though mapping out his path. “I am a refugee,” he adds in a voice lower still, and glances away as though ashamed. “My name is Amaroq.” He gives it to her as though it is all he has - and hopes she comes nearer, and nearer yet, this unicorn who has a city on a hill. @Isra amaroq