The sea is singing through my veins in notes of roaring currents and black tides. Note by note the song is rising in pitch. It echoes in my ears like a heartbeat resting just above my own and it pulses behind my eyes like an embedded crown. And it does not quiet as Fable and I rise from the tides with that song echoing between us like another sea, another world, another realm in which there is only us.
That song turns like a wolf to the ball of fire that catches our eyes (and it snarls low in my chest, somewhere between the heart and the belly). I am too fresh from war to notice Morrighan beside it, too full of the lingering echoes in the canyons of my rage to see the flare of her sides. I answer her fury with fury, and her wrath with wrath, because I have forgotten how to speak in any other language but war.
All the sand around her hooves turns to quick-sand and vine. Sulfur stings my nose when the space between us turns to swamp and steel. I want to bellow with the rush of magic and tide when the waves rise up to my knees even though the distant moon is fighting me for the tide. But there are no gods of the night, or of the cosmos, here to take it from me. There is only the hiss of a fire turning into arrow and the roar of salt water blasting from Fable's mouth as he snarls his own echo of my rage. His flaring wings stir up the marsh-water and my eyes water against the tang of rotten brine.
He does not settle when I step forward. He flashes his teeth like weapons and snakes his head back and forth in anxious anger.
The quick-sand and swamp turns to marble as my hooves land upon it and the steel unfolds into flowers all rusted and wicked. My smile is full of too many teeth as I move to Morrighan, only now catching the pregnant flare of her hips (and somewhere, deep below the lingering war in my heart I rejoice at the sight). “Still impulsive. Time has not settled you at all Morrighan.” The arrows on my shoulder blaze to life and set the darkness lingering at the bottom of my gaze to glowing.
I have seen death, that blackness in the sea-blue says. I have become death.
I do not touch her. The sea is still singing in my veins. I do not want to hurt her.
“Did you doubt that I was going to return?” I know my voice holds a touch of laughter, below the fury, to see the embers still blazing just below her skin. And I wonder, as the sea settles at my back and the marble blooms around my feet (but not at hers, I do not trust her enough to change the swamp and quick-sand back to shell), if there are remnants of wildfires blazing across my home.
