amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
The sound their horns make together carries him home, a home that is far away, and long ago, and gone. But he carries the ghost of it as their weapons clack like autumn stags’, like the tusks of narwhals below the aurora with their breath steaming above them. And that sound of challenge is enough to warm his blood, to shake him from the winter dream he lives in.
His tail twines, sinuous, an arc toward the wolf like a hand ordering a dog to sit, be still. A wolf does not wonder if a coyote will leap for its throat, and Amaroq keeps his focus on the girl, wild thing she is, the color of angry ocean froth streaked with blue from well below the surface. He can smell the saltwater in her clearly, now, and if she were older he might feel threatened - or something else, something as ancient - but she is not.
I am better, she says, and by some magic sends his ice where he did not ask it to go.
Swift as any toothsome thing striking prey, Amaroq knocks his skull against hers in an impact hard enough to make his vision flash white. Even as it fades his lips are peeling back, teeth as pearl-white and sharp as hers in jaws that have killed many more than her youth can claim.
Just for a moment they reach for her throat - until he withdraws enough to regard her with a gaze holding all the impersonal hostility of winter. “I forgive your arrogance as youth,” he says, and his breath now is cold enough itself to bite. "But only once."
@Avesta |
