Quiet, the sort of quiet in his eyes, is not a sound I know how to fill on the eve of war. All the rage, all the wrath, all the daughter-of-the-sea hunger, is too heavy for silence to hold. Everything I am is made to fill a bellow, a wraith wolf bray, a clash of steel and horn and skin. But I discover, as I step towards him and away from the red-war and the red-tide where it brushes the bloated shore, that I want to learn how to be carried by the quiet.
I want to learn how to fill it slowly enough that it does not realize I am devouring it from the inside out (or maybe I only want to learn how to be devoured by the silence in turn).
“Somebody.” I answer him. Of course I am somebody.
Had we been standing belly deep in a field of daisies, or snow (the same snow my mother told me stories of) I might have given him my name. But it feels like a secret here and I’m not sure that frail meager things, like names, belong here on the shoreline of death. Maybe I should tell him that I will be death, or would be be death, the moment we step from the tide.
Later, when I wake, I might think that I should have warned him. But we are on the eve of war and I am somebody and he is nobody. There are men frothing for the kill between those rising god spires of smoke and there are innocent children trying to flee from their lashes.
We are on the eve of war and my stomach, my hunger, my need, is too hollow a thing for a fish to fill.
The sea is a kiss of blood against my belly and between the tangles of my tail when I move behind him to drive him, like a hound does a calf, towards the shore. I do not pause to wonder, as I know I should, if the spires of smoke or the spire of my horn seem more deadly. It’s the same way I do not pause to wonder if I should drive him away from war or towards it.
War is the only option here.
And I tell him that, in no uncertain way, when I lay my teeth against his hip is a whispering kiss of language. “We are here to fill our stomachs with more than fish.” He almost tastes of more-than-brine when I nip at his flank. “I was told once that if I call death freedom that it would not haunt me. Maybe we are only here to discover the truth of that statement.”
But I think, when I hear the bells start to toll out a body count, that everything I have ever learned is a terrible, bitter lie.
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