amaroq
in his own country
even Death can be kind
even Death can be kind
T
here is something strange about her eyes, now that he is close enough to see them fully; they shine like the moonlight on ice. At first he thinks like mine but no, that is not quite right - for where his own are colorless (now the blue-grey of the sea, sometimes the pewter of a bank of clouds in midwinter, sometimes dark as a squall) hers are silver, bright and beguiling. They do not look like the rest of her, gold and dark. He is curious, now, like a cat is curious. His tail twitches behind him, pale as sea-foam on the sand, making patterns that will never be read. A wonder, she says, and he tilts his fine and fearsome head toward that great wonder, which stretches on and on until it touches home. The breeze off the water is cool, and when he blinks his no-color eyes closed he can almost smell snow amid the salt and brine.
When she speaks again his attention shifts back toward her, and his expression is smooth as the surface of a tide-pool, unruffled by wind. Yet he takes another step toward her, and now he is near enough the smell of her outweighs the smell of the sea, and she smells like summer.
Ice begins to grow around his feet, a strange and lacy flower blooming on the sand.
“If my kind wrote the books, they would show we are all beasts.” His words now are as hard as a honed spear. He thinks of the land-horses within their walls, scratching ink on old skin by firelight, and his lips curl up in a snarl. They were shaping the world to their liking, and in their world his kind lived only in pressed pages.
Where her next words might have soothed him, when he looks at her now (with his mind full of spears more numerous than the horns of his people, thrust up from frigid water) he does not hide the gleam of his teeth. “And what do I look like?”
Despite her silver eyes, despite the way she calls the ocean a wonder, she is still one of them - an injured hunter, a maybe-prey.
It is impossible for him to forget it.
@Samaira |
