El Rey —
Dark-heaving;boundless, endless, and sublime,
The sound of water pouring off a body sends him spinning. El Rey faces the mare, neck curled, horns prepared to wound. She’s smiling. Why is she smiling? Something about it is predatory, unnatural - he can’t quite place why her mouth looks so strange. “You look like you’ve been through hell,” she says. El Rey swallows, and relaxes his muscles a little, mostly to make a show of it for her - whatever her intentions. He glances over her form, slick and taut with muscle and armed with horns (and that’s the least of it.) She looks built for something, but he isn’t certain that it’s war.
“So I have,” he says. He edges towards the shore a little. Juniper told him of the kelpies that roam the swamps, but what of the oceans, the creeks, the stagnant lakes? He doesn’t know enough to be certain. All he knows is that something feels off. And - come to think of it - what was she doing under the water for so long? “And yourself? Hunting for -” he pauses, rethinks - “-pearls?”
