[P] Sink

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind She is beautiful when she breaks the water. Here, with her head slick-wet like an anointing, the kelpie’s skin sparkles silver-white in the sun. Salt flakes on her lashes like snow, and the color of her eyes is far more vivid, as though beneath the surface it is only a hazy dream-version of itself. It has been so long since he has seen another like himself. Like, and not like at all - for she is far from his people of the star-strewn north. All they share is a hunger, and the kind of beauty that toes the line with savagery and makes their prey come nearer, and nearer yet. They do not have to wail, and play lost in the night; they do not have to sing. They will always be fed. Her voice is slippery, low as an undertow. Amaroq does not alter his steady regard at her greeting, and for a long moment after her question the only answering voice belongs to the gulls. At last he says, quietly, “I hunt these waters.” Vapor joins his words like they are little bits of ice fallen in the summer sea. The unicorn does not say a refugee, as he had to the queen with the sea-eyes of the city on the hill. It feels less true now than it had then. It is almost grudgingly that he adds, “My name is Amaroq.” His name is not a sacred thing to him, but he still wears it close as the tokens wound into his mane; it feels strange to part with it now, but no stranger than her neck must have felt with his teeth to it. Above the water, he had yet to smile. But now he does, and it thaws the glacial edges of his cheeks, the chill of his eyes. It shows, too, the gleam of teeth, little jagged whitecaps against the black of his lips. Up here, they are near enough to shore that the air is humid and green-smelling. Amaroq is unabashed in his study of her, though he prefers the way she looks in world below the surface, the way the light colored her sinuous form like something from a dream. “I’m glad you followed me. I would show you something.” He is harsh in the full light of day, clearly more a thing made for moonlight and underwater; it’s too easy now to see how sharp-edged he is, how alien. Yet all the predatory tension has gone, and when he glances at a flock of sandpipers with sunlight flashing off their wings he looks almost like any other unicorn. @Anandi <3 amaroq