Finally I see the water wake of the mirestag where he has left tracks in the mush that the almost non-existent tide cannot hide. My knees are coated in slime, and algae, and water with enough brine and sulfur in it to make my eyes water. I am wise enough to admit, as the lingering ice brushes against my belly, that I had been almost aimless in my hunting. Hunger has always, always made an almost-fool of me.
But it’s something more than hunger that sparks and smolders in my stomach when I see his tines outlined and dark against the banana trees and weeping ferns. A dark thing curls around my heart and it tightens and tightens like a sea-tide noose when I try to settle my bones into a shape less like fury. When the mare approaches, a golden sun to the dark mirestag in the foliage and the bottom-of-the-sea-hunger in my chest, I know that I am unsuccessful when I turn to her.
My teeth feel like monsters of their own in my mouth when I turn a single ear towards the mare. I am too needy, too lost, to pull my gaze from the dark outline of my kill. And he will be my kill. He was my kill the second the old swamp mare told me the story. “And are you not destroying them as well?” I try to hide the snarl in my voice, the spit of hunger, the need of a thing more sea-monster than mare. But I’m not sure I’m successful when I finally turn my gaze from the mirestag.
The last time I saw a horse this golden, all sunbright skin and bone-pale hair, they were trying to kill me. My mother used to be this golden.
I have never been fond of the color of wealth.
“What I want is not something you can or should give.” The smile following my words is an echo of my wolf’s smile, all winter and teeth and insides out for all to see. I do not tell her I am not a sick thing for I know the flash of the black-sea as it shifts strangely across my gaze is not a look a sick or dying thing knows how to make.
The mirestag shifts and I can hear the algae shift around him and the vines catch in his tines. He is spooked, I know, by the sound of our voices. He can spook as much as he wants and try to run through the muck. But I am close enough to see the vines across his hips and I grew up racing wolves and dragons.He will not outrun me.
He will not survive me and all the golden mares in the world will not stop me now.
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