War is a thing, a terrible sort of thing, that lingers in the blood thicker than any disease. Insidious in nature it creeps, and burrows like a worm, and picks at the liver like a carrion bird a corpse in winter. The poison sits in my blood now changing me in all the ways the sea neglected to. I am a shape-shifter now: a girl, a weapon, a unicorn, a monster that does not seek only retribution but destruction.
I let her cut me and cleave a scale from my cheek like it’s a kiss stolen instead of flesh. I let her because it will be easier, when Aspara asks me of the blood between my teeth, to call it retribution instead of wrath, and war, and a sickness so deep it has burrowed into the black-sea center of my soul.
The shape of her teeth, the way they shine like stars waiting to be cut out of the black and be filled with moonlight, is the only permission I need the moment she touches me with violence. And I might be touched by her violence, but I am consumed by my own. I am devoured by it.
Foras is, in turn, consumed by his own as every inside of him sprouts through the outside fur of him like a weed as insidious as war. Winter rises from his skin instead of falling like snow from it. My breath, when I exhale the breath she failed to steal from her, turns to frost and ice.
How many stallions, how many things born in the womb of wrath, have tried to end me by laying teeth at my throat, or blade at my heart, or hate against my skin in one of the million shapes it might take? How many monsters have tried to devour me and in turn have been devoured? The answer, I know, when I will cut it into her skin will be enough to make a sea-map out of her.
If I am to die again it will not be at the blade of a thing shaping itself into a pale echo of war. I will die by the tide, or by war, and not by a unicorn acting like the wolf and the dragon that I was raised with.
Foras lungs for the unicorn, an easy thing when he’s larger than us both, and his claws do not move to beg entrance into her belly. They demand it. His snarl, when I twist my throat away from her horn and bare it in a dare to her teeth as my own jaw unhinges so that I might devour her better, is enough to rattle my heart.
I want to tell her that her teeth are made for roots instead of flesh. I want to tell her I can show her how to make them into something as dangerous as mine. But I think I will not tell her but take, and take, and take as she had taken from me.
She should have stolen a kiss instead of a scale.
I might have kissed her back.
@Isolt
