[P] kiss me, and you will see how important I am;

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind He is no prince to tip her chin up and tell her she is lovely. He is no hero, to show her all the ways that she is more than her violence, that there are weapons that can be used in more ways than war. See the ocean, he might say, how beautiful it is, how strange, how savage you must be to survive it! All lovely things in his world possess fangs and claws and a beating, bloody heart, and oh, how joyful they are for them! The point of his horn draws an arc over the horizon, and he breathes through flared nostrils the frigid winter wind sweeping in across the water. She does not say enough that Amaroq can hear the tears choke her throat but he can see, out of the corner of his eye, the way that she shivers with more than the wind. He does not hide his disappointment, the way his tail begins to curl and uncurl and sweep patterns in the sand, the way the bones and pearls knotted in his hair whisper against each other of his anger. You have so much, he wants to tell her. Why are you afraid. If he knew her at all - if he knew even her name - he might make such demands of her, the way friends do. But Amaroq is not her friend, and he welcomes the cold, breathes deeply of it, knows it could never match his own frigid, lonely soul. When he looks at her at last it is not her he sees at all, but every warrior with a spear-point and a cruel heart that hunted his people - yet claimed to be empty, pretended to be lost. Anger rises in him like a coming wave, dredging up the dark sea-floor of his heart, mingling with the magic in his saltwater veins until ice slicks itself along his sides, crusting with salt in the thin crevices of his horn. His eyes are hard as gleaming pearls, and so too are his teeth when he finally bares them. In a burst of movement that shatters the ice blooming around him like asters in the sand, Amaroq lunges toward her. His mouth is opened wide, wide, wide, like a bear, like a shark, like a monster, revealing neat rows of teeth splendid and sharp. And when the kelpie reaches for her throat he doesn’t know if it is to kill her - or to force her to live. @Marisol amaroq