amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
He watches as she circles, the pale moon-shine of his eyes following her, his teeth barely kept behind his dark lips. When she snaps her tail toward him like a whip a shiver runs through his muscles, a tensing like his body is wanting to leap. But the unicorn only follows her with a tilt of his head, the long bone of his horn pointing like an accusing finger. “Is there nothing you would ask, if you won a favor from a god?” His voice is flat, distant and cold on this humid, symphonic island.
But he knows that she is right. Amaroq keeps no gods (none but the sea, and the stars, and the ice) and there is nothing this relic could mean to him, nothing suggested by the scant rumors he has chanced to hear. And yet - there is the island. There are the animals with eyes of stone and the flowers that drop pearls like perfect fruit. There is the music he has heard, sometimes, as he’s moved through the heart of the island like a patch of moonlight, a strange song born of the wind or the trees or the birds that shouldn’t be. And what else has the kelpie to do here (hunted, and alone) but look?
She stops. The crimson of her hair and head is the color of dried blood in the bluish night and her eyes burn out from the bone-pale of her face, needful, demanding. Impudent. If she were of his people (and how that thought stirs something in him, a want he quells with the cold control of a strangling fist) she might be praised for her questions, numerous as a new-whelped pup’s, or cuffed.
But she is foreign, strange as the island - except for the way she watches the sea. Except for the way she says the hunt.
For a long moment he is quiet, regarding her. Even in the wet heat of the island night his breath is a silver cloud between his teeth. There is only the stream laughing out to the sea, and the jungle dark and choking on both sides, and a woman who moves quick and restless as fire and himself, stoic and hard as ice. But this time, when he speaks, his voice is soft, and shifting, and holy as the aurora.
“I love that even the hare is made divine when the wolf’s teeth close around it’s neck.” His eyes flicker silver; the wind rises, pulling fingers through their hair, setting the bones and shells in his to soft chiming.
“I love how my body sings of purpose in each stretching sinew on a wild night coursing seals beneath the sickle moon.” It is hard not to think of home (to ache with the thought of it), and there is frost creeping up his fetlocks, forming delicate as lace in fractals down his back.
“I love how it is to hunt with my people, in harmony down to our breaths, each knowing the role they must play if we are to fill our bellies before the freeze comes.” And now that ice must have reached his heart, for it is tight with pain, seized between jaws that are closing. If he closed his eyes, he might see them: scores of kelpies limned in moonlight, horns like masts jutting from the surface of the sea, the blue-grey-silver of their pelts quick beneath the water. But Amaroq does not close his eyes; they seek out her own, they swallow her up.
At last he moves, quick as though coursing through water. His chest is a hairs-breadth from her shoulder, and he wonders if she feels the cold of him the way he feels the heat rolling off of her; he wonders how hot her blood runs beneath her flesh, whether it might smoke like a dragon’s if spilled. His muscular neck is arched, his muzzle above the nape of her neck, his teeth hidden behind dark lips until he begins to smile (and there is nothing kind in it; it is fierce with pride, a savage kind of joy).
”I love to know that for another day I am the strongest.”
It is difficult, to turn his head away until his gaze is level with hers. It is difficult, when he is so close, not to touch, not to taste, not to wonder -
And to know that she must be wondering, too.
Yet there is no blood in the air, only a night blooming strange around them. And his smile melts away until once more he is cold and impassive as a star.
“But I hunt to live, walker. It is my purpose and my birthright. Why do you?”
@boudika | <3
