I am so used to sea-water that the air slipping around inside my lungs like oil feels of winter. It blossoms frost across my cells like roots, and dirt, and rocks broken down by eons. I can taste it between my teeth when I lick at the backs of them as a wolf does. My soul sighs at the taste in the way a poet sighs at the moon, or at a woman walking long-legged and fragile through a garden.
The wind billows through my mane, and my collar, and through the spectral fur of Foras. It whispers to me, calling me home like the forests and corpses call a wraith wolf home. I am wild with it when I hear the howl on the wind.
And it's not the come home, come home, come that we answer back as two wolves instead of a wolf and a unicorn. We bray at the ash, and the dust, and the devouring in the way a pack worships the moon. Our teeth flash like bone-white sickle moons beneath the darkness of our lips. Our bellies coo like a shoreline and our legs quiver with the need to run, and hunt, and conquer.
The belly of the ship groans as it sinks into the sand and I imagine us washing into the shore like a storm instead of wood. And I imagine my steps are thunder as I leap from the deck into the silt and muck and seawater. Foras lands beside me, graceful and eager as a young fox at the sight of his brother.
We lift our noses up and howl again and this time there is thunder in the sound of us. Our eyes flash black, and silver, and cosmic as we look again at the two pieces of our souls we had left behind. I wonder if Aspara can still see the war in me. I wonder if she can see the places were the sea has devoured my blood and bloated my heart.
I wonder if she can see the crown of death curling around my horn like a vine.
And I wonder if my kiss feels like frost or like fire as I press my lips to her cheek to muffle the howl that my lungs are still singing.
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