amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
There is something wrong with the sea here.
There is something wrong with all of it, he knows, but the overworld, the one of trees and wind and chaotic noise, is still none of his concern. But the water -
He’d tried to slip into it, from the bridge and then from the shore, a cove hidden away from the unicorn statue and all the horses gathered with their incessant talking. But even knee-deep with the current just beginning to tug him away Amaroq had felt the wrongness of it, the way it slid around his skin in a texture unfamiliar. He had seen a few places where lava still ran red and steaming into the bay and he had heard the cries of creatures enormous and alien.
The kelpie knows that he should leave. He misses the cold of deep black water, misses the lull of a world silent but for whale-song and the laughter of the seals, hates the crawl of humidity across his skin and the cacophony of color and sound. But there is power here, there is a magic that calls to his own. There is prey that has never seen a hunter. And there is his own curiosity, as sharp as his hunger, as easy to feed.
Sunrise, high tide, waves beating against the rock - these things draw him from the dark heart of the forest, a world of black and phosphorescent blue, almost familiar. The kelpie follows a stream back to the sea, but he pauses with the treeline a dark wall behind him at the sight of a silhouette on the shore. She is only a black shape with the sunrise before her, but he can see the glint of her knife as it rises and falls, rises and falls, catching the sunlight and flashing silver, flashing red.
As if hooked by the tip of the blade, the line of his mouth carves into a grin. When he steps forward again his steps are easy, his head is low, his long spiral of horn draws circles against the red sunrise. The woman’s hair and his own is the same, pale as seafoam or cloud. Only when she turns a little does he see the spikes along her back. Amaroq cannot know what she is, but he does know a dangerous thing, when he sees it.
He stops before he reaches her, hooves sinking into silt, so that she is caught between him and the frothing tide. His eyes do not leave her; he cares nothing for sharks.
“A red morning means a storm,” he says, offhand, and does not take his gaze from the woman bathed crimson by the dawn.
@Locust | *rubs hands together*
