[P] Sink

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind Anandi, she names herself, and he glances at the silver underneath the water, where her body becomes sinuous and long, the eel’s tail that curved like notes of music through the kelp. An-an-di, sleek and silver little song, the trickle and laughter of a brook in your mouth. He nods, like they have exchanged small gifts, but when she calls him beautiful the only thing he does is look at her, long and sharp. The beauty of them is nothing to Amaroq but a fact. A trait that helps them eat. And maybe his belly is sharpening with hunger now, for he turns his gaze away from her, back toward the bay, where there is a far clamor on the beach. His exhale is a plume of vapor that dissipates at her question. “The commander?” he echoes, the word absent of all recognition. But he is picturing her already, the girl with the wings and the spear, the dark skin and the eyes as grey and flat as slate, the underside of her feathers like fresh-fallen snow. How well he remembers the smell of her, the iron taste of her blood as it mingled with salt in his mouth, the bruises she gave him as she fought, the white of her eyes, the foaming of the water. All of these things are in his eyes when he looks back at Anandi. “She never said who she was. I asked her of herself and she told me she was a used pair of wings. A vessel for duty.” There is no regret in him; his tone is as even as an ice-floe, his features remote. Only when he smiles - small, and wicked regardless of intent with the glint of his teeth - does he look like anything other than a wolf with its ears cocked to listen to the wind. How well he remembers the disappointment he’d felt, when he spoke with her - the way her words rang hollow as a bell, echoing empty in her eyes. How he had despised her a little for her stubborn weakness. How even as his teeth closed on her in those first thrashing moments he wasn’t sure whether it was her death he wanted, or her birth. “I disagreed,” he says simply. “I hope she has changed her mind.” The kelpie watches Anandi nod, small and stiff, and he sees, too, the curve at the corner of her lips. When she goes under, he draws his lungs full of air and does the same. This near to the surface the water is a warm embrace. He begins to swim at once, not looking at the rippling of light at the surface, not looking at the predator who trails him. Down and down he goes, angling toward the shoreline, where the cliffs cut deep and their shadows lean out over the sea and make everything cold and dark. The white of him is a beacon that fish and otters have learned to flee. The black of rock rises up before them like the walls of Atlantis. In the rock there is a small round mouth, jagged with the teeth of stalactites, a vague blue tunnel in the dark. Amaroq doesn’t hesitate before swimming for it, and he begins to feel the burn of his breath in his lungs, the press of the water around him, the humming crackling singing of all the noises above and below. The ocean is not silent, as some believe. For a moment the tunnel underwater is all blackness and he thinks it is what death must feel like, caught alone in the cold and the dark. And then he is through, and his head is breaking the surface again, but it is no blue sky that unfolds above him (above them) but the alien glow of bioluminescent stars on the ceiling of a cave. There is light somewhere, bleeding in through the rock in tremulous shafts that shift as clouds pass over the sun far away. Water murmurs as it runs over stone and when he breathes in, deeply, greedy for air, it seems as though the cavern is breathing with him. There is a passageway that disappears further beneath the cliffs, and it is this the kelpie studies as he pulls himself from the ocean and steps into the cathedral the sea has carved. He only turns when he hears Anandi behind him. “I don’t know how far it goes.” His voice is soft, almost reverent. “But I know I am not the first to find it.” @Anandi <3 hope this is ok! I feel like nothing actually happens in his posts haha amaroq