There at times, and moments just like this one, where I realize how strange, how savage, how like a unicorn war has made me. Sometimes I think it was only the sea that turned me into whatever it is I have become (I have no name for it, not really). But when I look at her, with her warm and sympathetic gaze, I can only think of how things like that do not survive in the tides of carnage and hate.
Isra could have been like this, I know, had she not been forged in the flames of lust, and hate, and love. I could have been like this too, like a thing more similar to Aspara than I am.
But I am forged, and I am dead, and I want to cut the look out of her eyes that whispers to me of mother, mother, mother.
In me there is too much wolf to look at her when she steps closer like a sun to my moon (and the moon does not look at the sun as much as it swallows it night, after night, after night). And I might swallow her down too.
Look (there!) a bit of molten gold that is sweeter than fruit.
Part of me wants to swing my horn towards her instead of the mirestag just to see if another swamp thing might hold the same magic in the blood of it. “There is little under water that I care for.” There lingers, in the silence after my words, a weight that suggests that I might care the same for her if I drowned out that mother, mother, mother look in her gaze.
I could make her into something forged too, something dead, something that might cut the world open with me just to see how it might be made into something better (something where men and mothers do not look at monsters with anything but fear and respect). In my world there would be no war because I would swallow it all like a moon swallows a bit of sunlight. I would strangle it in the hollow, sickle curve of my stomach.
The stag moves through the water and I follow without a care for things trampled in my way. The promise of the maybe magic in his blood far, far outweighs any consequence. And what is a consequence to a thing that knows, intimately knows, how painful it is to die? The memories of the water do not inspire fear or caution in me. I remember all the things the water has done and it is far worse than any thing done by a unicorn, or a horse, or a pale mockery of a mother.
“I do not plan on eating the mushrooms.” My body echoes another step of the mirestag, my hooves nothing more loud than another whisper of vine through the mire. “I care only for the creature eating them, and if the water would like to remember it I hope it remembers exactly the shape of me.” The mirestag leaps ahead, a dead-thing running, and I lunge into the start of a chase.
Mother, mother, mother looks mean nothing with the possibility of freedom so close that I can smell the fear rising chaotic from its skin.
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