amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
He returns with the winter, when ice chokes up the harbor and fog creeps up the streets.
He returns for her.
Guilt is not a feeling he takes to naturally - not he, creature of instinct and need, of hunger and survival. But he knows, he knows, that the way he left her was cruel, and wrong, and it is not what he had meant to happen. There is a new scar, carved by a sword, that travels a thin silver line from his shoulder to his throat. There is a new wariness, a new hostility, to the other horses he passes as he walks further into Denocte, with the bells of the harbor tolling ghostly in the mist.
He has always hated them, these land-horses, so graceless and obtuse. But he has never bled at their hands, not until the island, not until the pirate.
Tonight they avoid him, this ghost-grey unicorn who parts like the mist as though he’s born of it. He can feel their eyes on him, the draw that has always been between his kind and theirs; if he were hunting, he would smile. If he were hunting, he would catch their eye and beckon them closer, closer. But Amaroq is tracking something different, something made and not born. Something he owes, and regrets.
In the city the fog mixes with the bonfire smoke, damp limbs crackling an ancient kind of music. In the city the buildings hem him in, more dangerous than the shining cliffs of icebergs. In the city he is not a king of anything, and he knows it, and the bones and shells wound in his hair chime of warning and loss.
He is looking for a flame in the shape of a woman. He is looking for Boudika, and he will find her if he has to hunt until summer.
@Boudika |
