amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
It feels like a dream, here below the trees. Amaroq is grateful for the mercy of the night; in daylight so much chaos and color and noise would turn him away. The air smells vivid green: the green of sap from a branch just-snapped, the green of rot below tangles of roots and blankets of leaves, the green of things forever growing and dying. She is not wrong, when she suggests that he is out of his element. All he knows is blue and white and a bare and biting kind of cold. But this is far from the first adaptation he’s had to make to survive, and all streams run eventually to the sea.
He watches, impassive, as she steps nearer. The pale strands of his mane cling to his neck fine as spiderwebs and his eyes gleam as pale as the moon and the stream. When the wind sighs through the winding curl of his horn he smiles in a way that says something is always wailing in the night.
But he is not all stillness, not all ice. When she leaps the kelpie rounds on her like a wolf, angling his chest toward hers, his head high with warning. Yet the flash of color that limns her white face catches him, and when she looks down to the water he follows her gaze, falling back unmoving but for the rise and fall of his breath. Even the silver of that catches in his throat to look at the colors unfolding below them, blooming and receding. When his eyes sting it takes him a moment to realize why -
that it looks like home. That it is a kind of imitation of the curtain of blues and greens and golds and reds that once unfurled across his frigid sky like one world opening onto another. He remembers how it felt to swim in waters of emerald and violet with his people and hear the voices of the whales as they sang songs of wonder. How holy those nights were, such long ago glories.
Sorrow makes him furious, but beauty and wildness softens him; when he withdraws from her, turning his finely carved head away, it is because he doesn’t trust his teeth. Cold radiates from him the way heat does from her, as though she’s painted with living fire. It’s a wonder there isn’t a storm between them, and now Amaroq can feel his heart beating in his chest like a sealskin drum with the ferocity of his feeling. “No place worth knowing is,” he answers her, but his words are as flat as a glacier plane. Amaroq can feel her eyes on him, burning like cupped flame, but he does not meet them.
Not until she dips her tail into that painted water, and colors him with it. Then he looks at her, and he is not quite smiling, but there is something unsettled in his eyes, a mad kind of wildness. The thought of home is an anchor that can still drown him, but he wills it buried in the dark silt of his heart. I will not run, she says, and the water she flicked on him turns to ice on his skin, and with the way the blues and greens trace her, softening and deepening her crimson, they could be underwater.
He says nothing when she turns his question back on him. But he reaches out, and the charms in his hair cry out in little voices of warning, and if she does not turn away he touches his nose to her cheek. There is something tender in the gesture, despite the war-drum of his heart, like something fae marking a child for wonders unknown. His skin is as velvet-soft as a seals’; compared to his ice her body seems to burn, like it’s stolen the warmth of fire along with the color.
“Hunt with me,” the kelpie says, and it is not quite a question.
@boudika |
