[AW] hymns of salt and terror;

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind I could help you hunt, she says, and it is not the sight of her fangs alone, small and pale and almost hidden in the rain-drenched shadows of the forest, that makes him think yes, she could. It is the way she watches him, the way she moves, the way her fearlessness is not borne of ignorance. It is clear that she knows some of the same lessons as he - the old things, the blood-and-bone things. He only wonders how, for he has never seen anything of her like before. Amaroq says nothing in response to it, but his eyes like ice-chips flicker to her smiling mouth, to her curving body, to the ribbons that trail her like bubbles below the ice. The kelpie does not have a tale to ascribe to her; all his stories are born of the ice and cold and black black sea. There is no name for a color like hers in his world. But he is not in his world anymore. And at last he tilts his head, not quite a nod, and feels the raindrops turn to ice and stutter like pricks along his skin instead of sliding, smooth and warm. Only his tail moves as she at last steps nearer, each step releasing the scent of damp green forest, of rich black earth. Everything in the forest is luscious and strange, nothing like the world of starkness and cruelty he has known, and curiosity is only another kind of hunger in him now. When she is near enough for their breaths to mingle (hers summer-warm, his rimed in frost) he shows his teeth, but it is something other than warning. One wolf to another, a more primal testing. As he does it he tests the scent of her, puts it against what else he knows of this warm strange world. She is not like the unicorn queen, and he wonders - he wonders - if she is alone, too. They are alike, but oh! in how many ways? “For now,” he says, and still he does not smile. He has stood long enough now that the rainwater collecting beneath him is beginning to freeze, a skein of ice so delicate in this summer storm; as soon as he moves again it will be gone, melted to nothing but a cool wet kiss on the path. What are you? he wants to ask, and his tail twists, leonine, straying so near one of her trailing, sinuous bits of cloth. The trees groan in the wind, the rain drowns out the sound of the nearby sea. “What is your prey?” He thinks she might name anything, a creature such as this - it is so easy to picture her with blood on her jaws. @Euryale late and meh but I love her! amaroq