This, a meeting of two monsters in the winter-woods, sits in my soul like law etched into marble. The curl of a lips, the flash of a fang, the snarl and the spit of creatures driven by hunger and need. His language, older perhaps, is no different than mine and my wolf's. We are gods in this language as dead things are to the lotus flowers and the carrion birds.
We are masters of it. By want of war and knowledge of it we are masters (and masterpiece makers) of this dark-woods and all the monsters pretending ownership of it.
I smile when he answers with both the language of man and the sounds of beasts. There is a wave fat with ice in his growl and seaweed tangled between his words. But I am winter, and the taken-by-the-sea-girl, and I rest by head by a wolf who turns his insides out instead of growling, and I there is more than a wave in my voice. There is a distant tidal roar, a whisper of bone caught in the surf, a winter-middle instead of winter-start. “Do you think it wise,” I unfold from the moonlight in the same way my mother once did, “for the hunter to taunt the wolves to leave their own den, in their forest, in which the hunter is nothing more than an interloper?”
And perhaps he was foolish enough to think me a thing hiding in the dark forest, a wraith instead of the ruination of the ghosts. Perhaps he did not listen to the war in my steps and the hunger gurgling like a brook in my belly. Or perhaps he heard all those things as we approached each other in the gloaming with brine on our lashes like snowflakes. Perhaps he thinks himself wolf instead of hunter.
I laugh, into the darkness like a falling star, as I move close enough to count the speaks of color on his pale belly (and hip, and neck). My memories draw constellations between the darker stains and my hunger tells me to connect them with lines of blood instead of light. And I almost ask him if he wants to be sword, or dragon, or mortal, by the grace of my creativity.
I almost ask him a hundred different questions as I raise my horn to tap a note of warning against his while Foras finishes becoming the vision of the monster that lives waiting, and ravenous, inside my bones. Instead I ask him nothing else with our horns resting against each other on a battle-field (like we are waiting only for the drums to start their song).
Into the darkness, blacker where his shadow falls against my lips, I smile.
@Amaroq
