amaroq
in his own country
even Death can be kind
even Death can be kind
H
e, too, should be studying the moon in her changeable face, letting the blood-light of her soak into his skin. Surely it means good fortune, a hunter’s moon, a promise to a people whose teeth are always sharp. Instead it is her face he regards, as though it carries some sign for him, some meaning. Is it there in the faint gleam of her eyes, pale as his own but burning with star-fire where his are only cold? Is there some answer for him in the song of her bells, in the rattle of his bones and shells to match them? If he counted each seed-pearl caught in the black of her hair would they spell out soft words of fate?
But Amaroq only believes in chance and in readiness.
Still he does not touch her, though his hair blows between them as the wind stirs, pale and delicate as foam against the rich black of her skin. And her own, equally unbound, lays across his shoulder, dark as a fissure against the curve of his neck. Each breath he draws unspools a little more of her secrets: now a trace of wood-smoke, now of rich dark loam. He smells no king upon her skin, only the things of the wild. The kelpie wonders if they are lies - is she a tame thing, too, a beast of castles and courts and nothing savage, nothing free?
Then she catches him with her gaze, holds him like a promise. Then the sigils flare brighter than snow-flakes or seed-pearls on her skin and there, oh, there! From the gleam in her eye he sees a falling star, a piece of the moon discarded, and he turns away to watch its track until it flares upon the snow. The air then smells sharp and hot despite the snow.
He is still turned away at her question, still wondering in the silent dark. The moon above is wondering, too, and changing - already a crescent thin as a fingernail is white again, already the eclipse is ending. Soon the world will let go its great breath.
“I am never satisfied,” he says, though he wonders as he does if this time it is a lie. Surely something in feels sated at the place where that star flared and died; or perhaps it is only because she has called him what he is. “and I am always hungry.” When he turns back to her his eyes are like the moon, full and strange.
But then he smiles again and he is almost just a unicorn (if a unicorn could ever be just anything), and only now - only because what she says sounds to him like a challenge - does he reach for her, and touch his lips to her neck, and breath a pattern of frost against the sigils that burn so bright and old against her skin. “You are lucky that tonight it is only for wonders.”
@Leto
