amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
For just a moment he imagines what it might be like, to be worshipped.
Amaroq has seen wonder and awe in the eyes of his prey, the ones he has turned and the ones not made to be hunters, only dead. If being a god is being feared then the kelpie has been holy, though now he is nothing more than a winter-lean ghost.
But he and his kind have been hunted in turn, and what gods are pursued and killed by their worshippers?
He breathes in sea-salt, he breathes out a stream of mist. Ice rimes the soft spirals of his horn and reaches out from where he stands, coating the tile and marble in frost. The unicorn’s pale eyes pass from the chestnut stallion to the orb that hangs behind him like a full moon and Amaroq’s gaze softens into curiosity. Now he leans back, now his tail lays like silk instead of twitching like a cat’s.
Caligo, the man says, and the name snares in his memory. He has heard it mentioned in the few times he’s neared the chaos of the city, but the only image he summons with it is that of a unicorn, a queen, with a brush of scales on her belly and a dragon by her side. My city, she’d said, though he knows she was not a god. At last he looks away from that small, strange moon and back to the stallion it follows.
“No one has been worshipped here for some time.” There are footprints in the dust of the temple but they all belong to him; the only scents of living things are birds and mice. If there are worshippers still then they are ghosts.
Amaroq tilts his head as he considers the stranger, and his horn of bone drops toward him like the point of a sword. It is not quite a threat; he is still more curious than he is hungry or vengeful or mad. “Perhaps I will be its god now,” he says, and smiles thinly, like autumn’s first frost.
@Metaphor | "speaks"
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