amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
Amaroq had never expected his life to become entwined with any of the horses of Novus.
He had expected to taste their blood. He had expected (oh, and he had) to change them by force, and not request; to multiply his own kind, to repay the sins of others whose lives were lived and spent a hundred miles from these shores.
And yet his gaze is filled with the flame of her; Boudika, whose crimson is a bonfire against the fog of winter, whose voice is a spark against the flint of his heart. Even as her voice turns bitter as maror he smiles, for he had survived, and a new scar was nothing to him. He had earned a lifetime of them, and this one, at least, had been better earned than most - and he still had the retribution to attend too.
“Your ghosts are not friendly,” he remarks wryly. Around them, city lives continue in the mist. Someone is calling out the last goods of the day; a bell peals the hour, distant and doleful. But such things are not for the likes of them, and soon the sound of the ocean overcomes them, washing them away decibel by decibel until the waves are the only thing he hears. They beckon, the way they always have; they hush him like a lullaby, the way they always have.
Some part of him still can’t believe he’s found her, even when his gaze turns to hers again, and catches the fire alive in her eyes. There on the beach with the water foaming at their feet they pause, her nose below his throat, and he closes his eyes to feel such distant things awaking as happiness and want. How long has it been, since he’s felt the warmth of another, since he’s felt their very heartbeat? How long since he’s thought, for her I would be prey?
It’s almost enough that the question’s answer doesn’t matter. But when it comes, Amaroq sighs the way the sea does, and leans into her touch. “Yes,” he agrees. “I think that you are…more than when I met you.” By which he means, her sorrow is not a thing he can taste, like salt or like iron. By which he means, she no longer seems like she might fling herself into the sea, and welcome the drowning.
When she steps away he finds he misses the warmth of her, and misses the song her blood had sang so close to his own. His own cold, he feels, had made him numb until this moment - but now the tides are alive in his blood again, and they are pulling, inexorable, toward the woman before him. Though he is her Maker, oh! It seems she could unravel him with so little as a look, and yet it is only the foam of the sea that touches his hooves until she speaks the syllables of his name.
Each droplet of water she splashes toward him turns to ice and falls, glimmering like a diamond, back onto the surface of the sea; and then he is after her, plunging into the water (home again, home even now) with the crush of pebbles beneath his feet and his chest against the warmth of her. “No,” he says, a breath in her ear, though they are alone, for all the ways the fog hides them from the city. “Though I hardly remember what it is to be otherwise.”
@Boudika |
