amaroq
in his own country
even Death can be kind
even Death can be kind
A
maroq does not believe in fate. It is not a law that his people bend to, not when they swim the waters like an osprey does the sky, not when they have a kingdom below their feet that others can never fathom. They set their direction by the stars but they are wild things, they are hunters, they choose their own path and their own prey. His god is the sea-ice, teaching him when to be hard and cold and when to yield and soften and draw back. His law is the one of tooth and claw.
Yet is he not an exile? The kelpie has not wondered whether he is free.
Neither does he now. How could he be otherwise, when the moon hangs red as a sunken copper coin above them, when the snow settles like pollen along his skin and does not melt? Amaroq shakes his head at her question; his teeth flash small and bright as the seed-pearls woven into her dark mane. “Why should it be one or the other?” he asks, and his gaze is as cold and sharp as the point of his horn of bone. “I belong to it, and it belongs to me.”
The unicorn settles back, then, regarding her, this girl whose veins are like a leaf’s, burning bright beneath her skin. Her eyes are a solstice moon, her bells toll merry and mournful by turns. When she tilts her chin up higher, proud and foolish, Amaroq smiles too.
It is not a comforting thing.
When she answers him he snorts, a soft sound that billows steam from his nostrils like a dragon. He is no more a creature of riddles than a wolf or a bear or a seal, and when she names the earth he shakes his head, for to him she has not left it at all. It is beneath them still, albeit slumbering under its blanket of snow.
He wants to smell her skin, to taste for himself what she has left behind to be here, and what it is that makes her shine so, luminous as the fish who never swim high enough to meet the light coming through the water. As she closes her eyes he steps nearer, until he could lay his horn across her shoulder like a knight, until he is too near even to plunge it into her heart. Beneath the clean scent of snow she smells of something rich and almost-sweet, like soil and leaves at the end of autumn. His eyes trace along her sigils bold as finger-tips, his lips still trace a smile.
“And are you satisfied by what you have found here?” he asks, and his voice curls around her soft and cool as the winter sea.
@Leto
