How disappointing, I want to tell him. I want to etch his failures into this skin for all to see. My
jaw wants to carve them into this throat before it devours them down into my stomach so the rest of the world might never have to bear witness. I want, oh I want, the flavor of his failure on my tongue and I want to call it anise.
The sea roars in my ears like I am nothing more than a wasted, empty shell spit up onto the sea by the wrath of a storm. It lingers in my heart like a stone, like a tide, like a net of seaweed in which my once-soul is caught. And I know, I’ve always known since the deep poured into me through my eyes and my mouth, that I’ll be caught there until I die.
If I can die, really die, anymore.
Do I even care?
His body is scarless when I look back at him, another man gilded and gold and red in a sea of useless genetics. I wonder what he thinks of death. Does he taste it on his tongue when he blinks the dream-sand from his eyes? Does he taste it on his tongue when he talks to girls with sharpness in their smiles instead of coyness?
Does he wonder if it’s something more than want of a song in my gaze when it flashes black as the midnight sea?
There is no kindness in my laugh. Nor is there anything coy and gentle in the sound of my amusement. My laugh is that of a wolf before an army of sheep. And I know I sound like my mother when she laughed her way to war because it was the only thing thick enough (thick as blood and oil) to drown out the sorrow.
Foras snarls for there is no amusement that might take seed in the soul of a wraith wolf. He flickers and his paws sink through the stone floor. His frost sticks to my tongue as his jaw shifts and forms where fur and softness once was. And maybe, maybe, now there is true amusement in the sounds my throat is making. Of course we have no need for lullabies. It’s another failure of this stallion to even talk of something so foolish and childish to a girl that counts his heartbeat instead of his steps.
I wonder if he tastes like brine or like sand. Surely it tastes nothing like war.
“If my mother sang me any songs at all I have forgotten them.” He really should have stepped back instead of settling on nothing more respectful than a lean. Foras steps closer to remind him. My smile turns both darker and brighter when my wolf snaps his teeth at the stallion’s knees. I follow the arc of the spit that falls from his jaws.
My own hunger spikes and turns feral. Brine rises from my belly like acid.
“A girl like me has no interest in many things.” I don’t bother to hide the pointed insult flashing in my eyes like lightning. And I don’t bother to show any caution as I turn from him to dissolve into a place in the crowd disappointing men will not follow.
Because a wolf hiding in the skin of a unicorn-dead-at-sea does not show her belly to a mere lion.
She eats him.
@Martell
