amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
The only thing Amaroq has ever loved was the sea.
He had been whelped on sea-ice in what passed for summer, when the sun never set but rolled along the flat horizion, dull and red. His nursery was foam and ice and turquoise water; he swam before he could walk. Sometimes, when he dreams, he is taking that first gasping breath with his head thrust above the surface, his nostrils slitted against saltwater and the gulls crying a frenzy overhead. Sometimes he remembers the leaping, fierce joy his people shared as they swam beneath the aurora, horns jutting like masts of pearl and bone, a savage, strange fleet beneath the stars.
Now he is the last, now he is the only. Now he is a ghost along a foreign shore, too loud, too warm, alone alone alone -
But at last it is winter. At last ice does not live in his veins alone, thick and sluggish as bad blood. The kelpie glides just below the surface, the gray and roiling sky on the other side of a pane of glass, and with a breath of magic he freezes that skein of water that separates him from the world. Now it is a fogged window he peers through, now the sea-birds winging above are blurred and distant.
It is quiet, below the waves. Here there are no icebergs to sing in the wind, no whales whose mournful voices carry across the empty miles. He dives deeper, swimming through a forest of kelp whose blades drift along his skin like slick fingers, grinning at fish who dart away like silver arrows.
At first he thinks it is a seal he hears, breaking below the waves into his world. Graceful as an orca he turns, licks his teeth, listens. Amaroq steals a breath from the surface then dives again, low and silent, ghostly in the blue. He is hungry for things other than meat, here in winter with the moon growing fuller by the night, but he is a predator and will not miss a chance to hunt.
But it is no seal.
Oh! The way his heart leaps in his chest to see her, plunging below the winter waves - for who other than one like himself would dare such a thing? He can just make out the red arch of her neck, the white slashes of her limbs as they cut through the water. Further, he wants to urge her, see me, and he begins to swim toward her as she turns back to shore. To watch her go - now his loneliness seizes him with teeth of desperation, threatening to shake him in its grip. Now he pursues her, froth in his wake, his heartbeat drumming stay.
When he surfaces he does not feel the cold bite of the air, not for the current of his hot blood and the hope that tightens his throat -
He stares at her across a few lengths of frigid water and begins to feel a winter gale howl within him. Saltwater streams from him in currents and his long hair clings to him, trailing away into the water like a drowned bride’s veil, while the drops of water rolling down his horn freeze in perfect pearls of ice. And all the while he is silent as snow, waiting to see what she is, if his hope will bloom to joy or rage.
@Boudika |
