[AW] hymns of salt and terror;

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind There is a different kind of hunger in her than what set him after the doe, but it is just as needful, just as ancient.  Overhead the heavens groan, and rain hisses on the leaves. Amaroq finds storms mesmerizing from underwater, but they were few in the frigid seas he was whelped in, and there is a vitality and immensity to standing amid this one. Through eyes as pale as ice he watches lightning paint the stranger; where before she was strange and beautiful as a viper the flashes of shadowless light paint her yet more arresting, holy and cruel as a goddess.  But the kelpie is a heathen; he submits only to death, and follows only his hunger. Right now his stomach ripples with it the way the world does with thunder, and he licks his teeth for the memory of iron.  Even so he forgets his earlier prey when she steps nearer still, a vivid ember beneath the driving rain. At her words, the laugh in them, he grins at last; it is wolfish, as much warning as mirth. “I am no one’s prey,” he says, yet still he lets her catch him - breathing frost into her lungs, a kiss that nips with teeth and cold. Amaroq breathes a pattern of vapor onto the place where her neck and shoulder meet so that his horn touches the crest of her neck like a knighting.  Already his teeth ache for more; already his saltwater blood begs him as both man and monster. By now they are both soaked, seal-slick and dark with rain, and when she speaks again he meets her eye.  “Ask me,” Amaroq tells her, low as the thunder, “and I will make you a queen of dark waters, such places as the sun never finds.” Unspoken, his gaze adds the warning - do not waste my time, not when I am hunting, not when I am hungry, or you’ll find you’ve come too close. There are many kinds of cold, and not all are for the living.  @Euryale  amaroq