amaroq
in his own country
even Death can be kind
even Death can be kind
T
hroughout the long and punishing summer the kelpie has laid low, letting the beating sun and the kingdoms’ chaos pass over him like waves above his head. He cares nothing for queens lost or found, or for the rise or fall of deserts; he waits for cooler wind, he hunts, he wonders when he will no longer be alone. And he wanders with the tide. He skirts the shores of all of Novus, though his havens remain in the south - but the prey has begun to learn him, around Denocte, and all the harbor seals and round-eyed hares have grown wary. So he travels, and today he finds himself on a beach with the sun fled behind grey clouds.
She looks like a shadow, when first she approaches: dark and sleek and graceful. But even with the sun covering its face he can pick up the glints of gold on her feathers and in her hair, and as he ambles nearer and nearer he can see the dapples of her skin and the pale mark of her eyes.
But it is not the beauty of her (not just that) that catches his interest sharp as a claw along his skin - it is her wing, folded and bandaged and tucked to her side.
No wolf turns away from the injured hind; no orca could ignore the blood of a dark-eyed seal in the water. It is these instincts and the familiar whisper of hate, coarse as a rime of salt on a dead stretch of beach, that draws him along the line where the water turns to foam. It is a line that ends at her.
Except for the gulls, except for the sandpipers and the plovers and the scuttling crabs, they are alone. And Amaroq walks like a king might walk, a pale winter unicorn in all of his glory, each spiral of his ivory horn gleaming like a pearl. For once he looks languid, a lion fed and proud and lazy, and it is impossible to see the pale glint in his eye like the smallest shard of ice.
“You look at it like it’s beautiful,” he says, in his accent clipped and low and strange. Amaroq wonders if she will look at him like that, too —
they often used to, before the end.
@Samaira | Asterion would have been so much nicer xD hope this is ok!
