amaroq
in his own country
Death can be kind
Death can be kind
No ghosts were friendly - but all of them were useful. Not all teachers gave pleasant lessons, and the painful ones were the best remembered. And until Amaroq became a ghost himself, he would not forget what he’d learned from the encounter with the black-faced stranger. (Not that the basic fact was anything new - hatred of his kind, he has found, is universal).
It is both easy and strange to be affectionate with her. To nip at her jaw as the takes a shell from his mane (a cantharus banded in a brown so deep it is nearly indigo, taken from a beach years ago as his people dozed after a successful hunt). To flick his tail so that is sprays them both with seawater, cold enough to shock him further awake.
But at the softness of her voice he stills, his gaze falling from the glow of Denocte’s harbor lights like soft bright eyes to her own. His own solitude has long been one of circumstance - but Boudika’s is something else. She has not been alone (even now she smells of bonfires, of other people as much as the sea), but Amaroq does not doubt that she has been apart.
“There is nothing wrong in being different, Boudika,” he says, first his voice and his eyes following her as she moves away, watching the water cleave around her. The unicorn savors her name, the drumbeat of it, before he advances again to meet her skin-to-skin. Here it smells more of ocean than anything, cold and clean. Behind them the city is a soot-smelling memory, something to be washed away. Before them is open water, masked by fog.
His expression turns considering at her not-quite-question. It does not shift when she continues before he has time to respond, though his slow smile returns, beckoned by the word we.
“We are,” he echoes, then says, his breath making a fine lace of ice on the sea,“But you are also one of my people, now.”
And we are all that is left. He doesn’t say it, but perhaps she recognizes the look in her eyes. Perhaps her Orestes had worn the same one, before he changed.
But no wild thing can cling to past sorrows and live. They are too much a snare, an anchor, a thing to capture you or drown you. He doesn’t want Boudika to drown - and anyway it does not seem like her nature, not when she is a thing of fire, meant to dance like sparks and drift like smoke, light enough to be carried by the wind.
A big wave laps up, leaves a cold kiss at his throat. When he licks his lips they taste of salt. “My people are ancient. They used to say that the ice was born of the stars, and we were born of the ice. We traveled seasonally, as all things there must - following the food, the ice.” He does not look at her, now - he watches the faint whitecaps, ghosts through the fog. “But like any people, we were not a monolith. Some were serious, some liked to play, liked to laugh more than the gulls did. And all of them underestimated the land-horses.”
Amaroq looks back at her abruptly. If there is pain in his eyes, or rage, it is hidden behind other things, a gravestone too coated in frost to read. “Show me what you’ve learned, while I’ve been gone,” he tells her, and then, with a flash of a grin, at least dives below the surface.
@Boudika |
