amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
She smashes his ice to shattered bits of glass, a tinkling of distant bells, and a savage grin slips onto Amaroq’s muzzle. Here is life, in the pinning of her ears and the thrash of her hooves and the wide curve of her nostrils, and it is life he knows and is hungry for.
Oh, the keplie has been a ghost since he arrived here, summer-weak and summer-thin. He has kept to the shores, taught the harbor seals and coastal deer to fear his shadow and his shape, but survival was not the same as living. The unicorn felt numb in his bones, a fading mist, a melting flake, a thing no more real than a beast in a book.
But now it is winter, and here is a foe who has submerged herself in the waves of his sea.
At last she looks at him, and his grin hints at teeth. His tail, braided with bits of bone and shell, lashes like a tiger’s when she steps nearer, and the pride in her voice lifts his own chin, tilts his spiraling horn to pierce the clouds. A friend, she says, and he blows out a harsh breath, the cold mist of a laugh. She should know, she must know, there are no friends between their kinds - there is only to hunt, there is only to kill or to die.
Or to haunt the edges, and never quite live.
Still there is something in her voice that keeps his feet set in the surf, even as he judges the distance between them, even as the sand sucks at his feet and each wave urges him forward, tugs him back. There is an umasked desperation, a want like despair, and Amaroq knows that feeling like he knows what it is to feel hot blood feel his mouth, to taste copper and salt.
She loves him. It is clear to the kelpie, clear as tracks in the snow or judging from a wisp of stratus cloud on the horizon that snowstorm will be on them. He wants to laugh at her, then, but he is curious, too, and he falls still where he stands. Even his grin fades away, and the only movement is his mane and tail riffled by the water and the wind and the slide of light down the slight curves of his long, sharp horn.
It has been a long time since he has seen love, even just a half of it, broken to sharpness on the edges.
And he would want to make you not alone. Yes - that is what a kelpie might say to its prey. Come away to the waters and the wild, come away and be not alone, come away and join me in a bond that is greater than love and we will take life between our teeth, we will drink the depths of the sea and rejoice beneath the aurora and all the world will tremble to see us, with longing and with awe.
He wonders why she had not joined him. He wonders if Orestes had loved her, too.
“I do not know this friend of yours.” Orestes - the name lives between them now, for she has made it so, and it carries a rhythm like the sea. Amaroq’s gaze is sea-ice, cold, alien, but with something stirring underneath. When she steps nearer it sparks to life and he leans forward, the wind sighing around his horn, the water sighing around their feet.
The unicorn considers her, and he does not show his teeth. Wolf-like he tilts his skull, wolf-like he regards her, and when he speaks it is almost soft, like the caress of foam around her feet, like the ice-shards she broke on the beach are forgotten. “How badly do you want to find him?”
He does not need to say I can help you. I can make it so that you might search each sea for him, and, once found, never leave his side. She knows what he is, she has named him.
"It is not good to be alone," he says, and the way he waits then is like a wolf, too.
@Boudika |
