amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
It is the furthest he’s ever come into the city.
For days he haunted the shores and coves, the ragged mouth of coastline that widened its jaws around Denocte. He sought her amongst the ice which sometimes sat silent and sometimes groaned like a mother. He hunted her among the beaches where seals watched him dark-eyed and uneasy. He went into the mountains, only as far as the crescent-moon lake, but even in doing so he knew he would not find her there.
Boudika is too much a thing of the sea.
At last, when all his nights ended empty, he began to look among the land-horses. Every time a dragon passed over he fell as still as a wolf, wondering if it belonged to the unicorn-queen - that one would be grown, by now, and Isra had not seemed the sort to forget her promises.
This evening, as the fog rolls and douses even some of Denocte’s bonfires, his gaze touches each horse he passes and falls away. He doesn’t imagine their lives, or pay attention to the way they watch him until they loose him in the soft gray night. The fog holds sounds close, sharing little beyond the opening and closing of doors, the ring of hooves on cobblestones. Voices that may as well be the chatter of gulls.
And then she is there. His heart loosens like a fist unclenching, a tension he hadn’t known he was holding. Amaroq does not smile often, but he does now, and it remains when he looks over her body like a lover long away and finds no wounds, no signs of hardship. Then it is back to her gaze, embers to his ice, and his mouth only fades to a flat line again when she speaks.
“I was driven away,” he says, and pride keeps his eyes on hers, his neck arched where shame wants it bent, ”after I saw you last.” His new scar itches; he wants to touch it as he did a hundred times while it was bleeding, scabbing, healing. Instead he reaches for her - not with teeth, but muzzle to muzzle, the soft skin of his nose. A mingling of breath.
“I regret it.” It is not I am sorry, or forgive me; the unicorn does not know how to say either, though perhaps he means them both. And there is more yet he wants to say - that she’d deserved more, that he wishes he could have seen her as she learned herself anew, that he missed her.
For months he hasn’t spoken. For months his nearest companions have been the porpoises, and the leopard seals, and the distant stars whose reflections trembled on the surface of the water. It feels strange to talk now; he would rather speak to her with the turn of an ear, the slide of a glance, the corner of his mouth. So he surprises himself when he asks, “Are you happy, Boudika?”
@Boudika |
