amaroq
I would know who roars mostly like the beast
going out to hunt and then back to feast
going out to hunt and then back to feast
S
alt and blood fill his mouth like a sacrament. Is there any holier communion than this? To be Remade beneath the unwavering light of the stars, held in the dark arms of the sea? She fights him. The kelpie does not fault her for it, does not relinquish his hold on her throat as her blows scrape across his barrel, his chest, his legs. The white of his hair haloes around them like a shroud as she struggles to live, caught between the blackness below and the faint blue light above. Dark thin streams of her blood and bubbles of breath and delicate flowers of ice all drift toward the surface. Far away something is singing in the dark, long lone notes like a mourner’s hymn.
And still he does not let go. Not until she twists toward him, teeth like new pearls; then Amaroq bares his throat for her, waits for the score of her jaws. They are not yet made for seizing and tearing (though perhaps they are changing already), but they still find their mark. His blood wells up like it is eager. And oh, it is, it is: no matter how many times he plays priest to this kind of conversion he is not immune to the ancient magic of it. What the air and the water sings with, what their own blood and sinew and bone hums with, it has nothing to do with the island, and every heartbeat chants of the change.
He knows the moment it takes in her because at last she falls still. Only then does he break away, opening up a space between them, enough to catch her crimson-dark eyes (how pleased he is, to find them unrimmed with panic-white) with his colorless stare. They wear one another’s blood along with their own.
There is no smile on his lips, which once more hide away his neat rows of curving teeth. But there is approval in his eyes, and he lowers his head in a bow to her before returning to the surface.
For Amaroq is no Orestes; his shape is unchanging, his lungs still need air. His horn is the first thing to break the surface, gleaming seashell-white, scattering droplets of water and ice; the arch of his neck follows, sinuous as an eel. The air above tastes too sweet after salt and iron and the waves are still sighing against the shore.
When she breaks the line between sea and sky like rising from a baptism he wants to ask her if she can feel it, the joy of the universe, shouting like fire in her veins. He wants to ask her Do you hate me, now? Amaroq wants to teach her all the lessons of her new world, like a father, or a mate.
But he only says, in a voice like ice thawing in spring, “Tell me your name.”
@Boudika |
