amaroq
in his own country
even Death can be kind
even Death can be kind
S
he is a shadow wearing starlight, the darkest thing in this night of strange lights beneath the blood-red moon. The bells she wears chime as though to mark a holy night and Amaroq thinks that they are not wrong - for the kelpie does not believe in miracles but he does believe in signs, and even he has seen few sights like this. He feels more alive than he has since he left behind the ice, since his people were slaughtered by silver blades beneath no moon at all. And his eyes, pale as wild snowflakes tossed by the blizzard, do not leave the shape of the girl. The unicorn thinks that she must feel it too, this feral pull (is it orchestrated by the moonlight, by the storm? Would they have met beneath a baleful sun, or when the bite of winter did not seize them by the throat?) for her eyes are latched on his own.
When the wind dies away with a last gasp the world is thrust to stillness. There is nothing, nothing but silence and the crimson moon and the flakes that have been set free to drift as they will, a slow and solemn dance until they light upon their skin. Each is a cold kiss that the kelpie does not feel.
It is well Amaroq doesn’t know it’s a king she thinks of, a man of soft seas and far stars. He is too distant, of late, to be jealous - but for her, this stranger bound with tokens so like his own, who meets him so boldly beneath a prophet’s sky, he thinks that he would hunt.
Or perhaps it is only the blizzard, turning the blood in his veins to ice.
Ice blooms upon him now, strange flowers made of frost, vines of it that wrap up and around the long spiral of his horn in delicate patterns like lace.
Still he does not smile, not even when she invokes the ocean, and begins unwinding a prophecy that he knows nothing of. “It is never far from me,” he says, and wonders whether he could knit up all of the distance between them before she grows afraid. Amaroq finds he wants to touch those bells, to fog them with his breath, to see if they might chime for him. Oh, but what song could they hope to sing underwater?
“And what have you left behind to come here?” With a sweep of his horn he gestures to the sky, to the moon that burns like a thousand-year fire and the snowflakes like ashes that come to melt upon them both.
@Leto | he isn't very talkative, sorry
