[P] Sink

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind There is a temptation, as they measure one another through the blue water, to flick his head, to lay open her cheek with the tip of his horn where the bone spirals into a deadly, marvelous point. It is not for boredom, or cruelty, or even curiosity  - it is for the pride he sees there, the sleepy, knowing pride of a cat. It is not the nature of a wolf to share its habitat with a hunter who stalks the same prey. And how easy would it be for her to hunt, in her fashion, with a livid scar blooming along her cheek? Or without one of those grass-green eyes, brighter than anything here beneath the waves? But Amaroq has enemies enough, above the water and below. It does not hurt to have another kelpie, another scapegoat for the walkers to suspect (he has seen the shadows too large to be birds skimming low over the water, he has kept to the secret coves and the open ocean to hunt his meals). More than this, it has been long and long since he swam with another like himself, and loneliness is its own kind of hunger, deeper than the want for blood. He can hear the running of her heart, fast as the breakers that rush up to the shoreline only to melt away to nothing. He does not turn his ice-colored eye from her as she lays a kiss against his cheek, and he grins, too, wide and lazy, even as his own heart bounds like a wolf over the snow to be touched so intimately. And then he lungs for her, swift as an eel, to lay his teeth against her throat. If he catches her (for with her fins she must be quicker than he, able to move like a shaft of sunlight through the deep) it is gentle as a dog soft-mouthed around a bird, a reminder and a warning, old as the hunt itself. I was here first. I am the alpha. When he withdraws, though, and the strange shifting light illuminates the silver scars that make strange runes of his pelt, he is grinning again, still watching her, heedless of the fish that part around them and the forest of kelp that drifts and sways. But Amaroq is no fish, and he cannot stay forever below. Again he dips his head to her in invitation to follow, and then he is swimming for the surface, silver-blue light falling around his shoulders, his long pale hair trailing after him like a burial shroud. It is too hot, too bright, and sunlight shatters on the water like it’s broken glass. But Amaroq lingers there, treading water with his powerful legs, content for a moment to breathe - and to see if the stranger is bold enough, curious enough, proud enough, to go after him still. @Anandi amaroq