It is impossible to ignore the ocean and the way its lulling, crashing, breaking waves have called to her ever since arriving here in Terrastella. It waited for her, beckoned to her, from just beyond the walls of the court.
Like the city, Samaira had never seen the ocean but for drawings and depictions in books her parents had shown her as a child. To be truthful she did not even know if her home had an ocean. Perhaps it had been landlocked and she had never known it.
So it is all of these things that brings Samaira to the beach on this autumn day, with a chill brushing its fingers across her skin and the sun hiding beneath a cover of clouds. She stands where the water rushes up to meet her hooves and she looks out toward the endless blue horizon and she breathes in the salt of the air. There is peace here. There is breathing and solitude and the ever constant ebb and flow of the waves.
It has been a month since she crash landed on this world, in a way she could have never fathomed was possible and still scarcely believed. A month that her wing had been bandaged to her side, useless, healing. Healing. This was the thing she reminded herself of.
One day she will fly again.
And when that day comes Samaira promises herself she will spread her wings, catch a breeze and follow this very ocean for as far as they will carry her. When her wing is well she will find a way to see all the things she has never seen before.
hroughout the long and punishing summer the kelpie has laid low, letting the beating sun and the kingdoms’ chaos pass over him like waves above his head. He cares nothing for queens lost or found, or for the rise or fall of deserts; he waits for cooler wind, he hunts, he wonders when he will no longer be alone.
And he wanders with the tide. He skirts the shores of all of Novus, though his havens remain in the south - but the prey has begun to learn him, around Denocte, and all the harbor seals and round-eyed hares have grown wary. So he travels, and today he finds himself on a beach with the sun fled behind grey clouds.
She looks like a shadow, when first she approaches: dark and sleek and graceful. But even with the sun covering its face he can pick up the glints of gold on her feathers and in her hair, and as he ambles nearer and nearer he can see the dapples of her skin and the pale mark of her eyes.
But it is not the beauty of her (not just that) that catches his interest sharp as a claw along his skin - it is her wing, folded and bandaged and tucked to her side.
No wolf turns away from the injured hind; no orca could ignore the blood of a dark-eyed seal in the water. It is these instincts and the familiar whisper of hate, coarse as a rime of salt on a dead stretch of beach, that draws him along the line where the water turns to foam. It is a line that ends at her.
Except for the gulls, except for the sandpipers and the plovers and the scuttling crabs, they are alone. And Amaroq walks like a king might walk, a pale winter unicorn in all of his glory, each spiral of his ivory horn gleaming like a pearl. For once he looks languid, a lion fed and proud and lazy, and it is impossible to see the pale glint in his eye like the smallest shard of ice.
“You look at it like it’s beautiful,” he says, in his accent clipped and low and strange. Amaroq wonders if she will look at him like that, too —
they often used to, before the end.
@Samaira | Asterion would have been so much nicer xD hope this is ok!
He is a wave in the blue grey ocean, rolling steadily but swiftly toward the shore. So much like the water he looks that his movement does not catch the attention of her silver eyes until he is almost at the beach. Until he is pulling himself from the water and Samaira watches it sluice from him, darkening the sand beneath where he stands. The beach is quiet but for the consistent roar of the waves in front of them and the piercing cry of the gulls above them and they are alone.
She cannot help but to watch him as he walks, for how could she possibly look elsewhere? He walks like he owns the ground he touches and the pegasus finds herself wondering more and more if, at the least, he is not a monarch of the sea. Her knowledge of the world is limited to what books her parents had managed to save before she was born, some quite old with worn spines and dog-eared pages. Others were filled with diagrams and illustrations, others only words, but Samaira remembers some books more fondly than others.
Such as a book that spoke of sirens of the sea, predators who roamed the ocean searching for unsuspecting prey. She remembers the drawings, of creatures with strange, elongated mouths filled with sharp teeth and gaunt, misshapen equine-like bodies. Some, even, had been drawn with tails that resembled that of fish. So when Samaira looks at this man who swims the ocean like it is home, she thinks of that book and she thinks that just because she had never seen the ocean before arriving in this world hadn’t meant it wasn’t real. He speaks to her and her dark lashes flutter over her silver eyes.
“It is,” she says simply, voice velvety and low with its own strange accent to pair alongside his, “It is a wonder.” Samaira wonders what it must look like in the light of sun, shining and deep and blue. She wants to know how far the horizon reaches and what is just beyond her line of sight waiting to be discovered and oh, one day she will know. One day she will discover it for herself. “Books do your kind no justice,” an assumption, and she watches him and wonders if her assumption is correct. She can’t tell if the smell of salt filling her senses is the ocean or his skin.
“They paint beasts,” but she has seen beasts, been face to face with them. Chased by them. Hunted. She has looked a beast in the eyes and watched him condemn her to death and escaped. There is still that all too familiar twinge in her heart as she thinks of him, but she has to remind herself that he cannot touch her here. Beasts... “but you do not look like a beast.” And perhaps that is her problem, that beasts are too easily hidden in the skin of men. Her lashes flutter again, her feathers ruffling in a cool breeze, as he glances back out at the water.
here is something strange about her eyes, now that he is close enough to see them fully; they shine like the moonlight on ice. At first he thinks like mine but no, that is not quite right - for where his own are colorless (now the blue-grey of the sea, sometimes the pewter of a bank of clouds in midwinter, sometimes dark as a squall) hers are silver, bright and beguiling. They do not look like the rest of her, gold and dark.
He is curious, now, like a cat is curious. His tail twitches behind him, pale as sea-foam on the sand, making patterns that will never be read. A wonder, she says, and he tilts his fine and fearsome head toward that great wonder, which stretches on and on until it touches home. The breeze off the water is cool, and when he blinks his no-color eyes closed he can almost smell snow amid the salt and brine.
When she speaks again his attention shifts back toward her, and his expression is smooth as the surface of a tide-pool, unruffled by wind. Yet he takes another step toward her, and now he is near enough the smell of her outweighs the smell of the sea, and she smells like summer.
Ice begins to grow around his feet, a strange and lacy flower blooming on the sand.
“If my kind wrote the books, they would show we are all beasts.” His words now are as hard as a honed spear. He thinks of the land-horses within their walls, scratching ink on old skin by firelight, and his lips curl up in a snarl. They were shaping the world to their liking, and in their world his kind lived only in pressed pages.
Where her next words might have soothed him, when he looks at her now (with his mind full of spears more numerous than the horns of his people, thrust up from frigid water) he does not hide the gleam of his teeth. “And what do I look like?”
Despite her silver eyes, despite the way she calls the ocean a wonder, she is still one of them - an injured hunter, a maybe-prey.
He draws ever nearer, so near she can see salt speckling his skin where the sea water dries in the chill wind coming off the ocean before them. So close that she can see the flecks of his strange, ice eyes. Pale and dull on this cloud covered day by the sea. Samaira thinks their eyes may be similar but that is where any similarity between them ends.
And oh, if it does not delight her even the smallest bit, how vastly different she can be from every other equine she meets. She is earth and sun and spring, and he is ice and ocean and winter. They stand as opposites, her made for the sky and he the water. Her fascination is deep and bright in her eyes as she looks at him. And when the crystals of ice begin to form at his feet there is, perhaps, a little awe and a little fear in her gaze and the fact that she isn't sure whether she should smile or frown.
Samaira thinks of the last time she saw magic, and she thinks of pretend wings made of shadows. A shiver passes down her spine, but if from her memories or the cold she can't tell.
When his countenance changes, everything that makes up Samaira wants to shy away from him. To put space between their bodies. The feathers of her good wing quiver, and if she could fly she might have, not unlike that fateful day. If she could she might run away to the sky, but she can't. Instead she boldly, bravely, foolishly holds her ground and let's him speak.
The pegasus doesn't miss the gleam of his teeth, even in the dull light, as he asks her what he looks like. “Like a man,” she says, looking into his winter eyes, then, “like me.” And Samaira doesn't mean it as though they could be mistaken for one another because it is obvious they could not. She means it that, Kelpies, Siren and Hunter of the Sea or not. Pegasus, Rider of the Skies or not. They are both equines, with hearts that beat and lungs that breathe.
“But,” she continues. Bravely, perhaps stupidly, the woman takes her eyes off him to look out over the blue green waves again. “Maybe that is the problem. That beasts so easily look like men,” and there is something haunted in the silver of her eyes. Something inside her whispers Cassius softly, again and again and again. The shiver that crawls over her skin this time is certainly not of the biting wind and she closes her eyes and breathes. Once, twice, thrice. When she opens them again, she finds him, still there on the beach. Still sea foam and salt and ice.
“How would you like me to see you?”
@Amaroq
we'll fulfill our dreams
and we'll be free
04-12-2019, 06:14 AM - This post was last modified: 04-12-2019, 06:15 AM by Samaira
ike me, she says, and he wants to show her, then, how wrong she is. That he is a thing of the wild and the water that does not live in a structure of stone and bed down in sweet-grass and eat oats and warm itself by the fire. That he is a hunter like the white bear and the wolf and his teeth are sharp, and he knows what blood tastes like, warm salt-and-copper between his teeth. It would be easy; she is injured, she is alone. He need only open his mouth -
But he would be proving her point. That he is a destroyer, too, and not for hunger but for his own whims - like any man.
So he only watches her, as she closes her eyes, as a shiver wends down her spine that has nothing to do with him. Amaroq does not step closer, not when he is near enough, already, to see the faint dapples on her like a yearling fawn. Not when he is far enough away that she might spring yet back toward the safety of her court.
When her silver gaze pierces him again he is still regarding her, and his expression does not shift at her question. For a moment he does not answer, and the gulls clamor overhead, and the sun splits through the clouds in shafts of brilliant light and is gone again, and at last he nods and speaks.
“As any other animal. A thing that does what it must to live, and feels no shame for it.” He does not say as beautiful. He does not say as dangerous. An orca cares not for the opinions of the seals - it only wants to eat. But then, a seal cannot hunt it back.
When he breaks his gaze away and looks out to the sea there is still something flat and glittering-hard in his gaze. It is the bitterness of seeing his people’s blood smeared on the snow, and knowing their killers would wear their coats and fashion their horns into trinkets, into spears. He cannot look at her as he says, “I do not know why men think they are better than any other creature that hunts to fill its belly and looks with awe upon the sea.”
If he looked at her, he might teach her all the ways that men are weaker than beasts.
As he speaks, Samaira cannot help but wonder if Cassius, too, feels no remorse for what he had done to her. Is he somewhere, feeling like he lost out on his prey? Thinking of her not like another equine but just some sort of possession or spoil. She looks at this man, standing there on the beach like the manifestation of some far away arctic, and can’t decide whether his own words put him on the same plane as Cassius or not.
“They are poisoned by greed, and greed makes them feel superior,” and she thinks again of Cassius, and every time his name passes through her thoughts her heart aches a little more, the silver of her eyes gets a little more distant and dull. Greed made Cassius into someone she didn’t recognize, someone with zealous obsession. It had made him dangerous, and she believes he would have done anything to get her to be his.
She would never be his. Not then, and not now that she was here, though sometimes in her dreams in the night she still felt like she was running. Still felt like he was there, breathing down her neck, smiling, smiling, smiling. Bright and mad.
Samaira breathes and it is a shuddering, strange breath. Like emerging from underwater after being submerged for some time. She blinks away the hollow, haunting shadows in her eyes and even though he won’t look at her. Even though he cannot look at her and she cannot know that, she does. She looks at him and tips her head and says, “I hope that the next time we meet you will extend to me the same courtesy, should it not be under as pleasant circumstances.”
It sounds like a goodbye, but also like a promise. She will treat him like any animal, and she will fight for her life if she needs to.
reed is for the weak.” There is a snarl on his mouth as he says it and he can feel his predator’s teeth against the soft inside of his mouth. He wants to bite down until he tastes the warm salt and copper of blood, even his own, for blood is the only response to such black and angry thoughts.
But Amaroq does not bite down; he licks his teeth, and sighs, and looks back to her. When he does there is a softening in his eyes, a melting of the glacier-ice. The kelpie understands that his frustration is misplaced on her, that this land horse (though perhaps not of land, perhaps of the sky, despite her injured wing) is not his enemy - even if she is still prey, and easy at that. A wounded bird.
He does not hunt birds.
When their eyes meet he holds the strange, liquid silver of hers, so like and so unlike his own. At her words he is still but for the breath that fogs the air before him, until at last he nods in return, and a smile curls along his too-long mouth.
“Look out for beasts,” he says, and Amaroq does not specify which kind. With a slow blink he turns back to the sea, facing the line of horizon where the water and the sky meet as one point. With a swiftness he hasn’t shown until now the keplie surges into the water, until the long pale threads of his mane and tail merge with the froth of the surf, until his neck is arching like the crest of a wave and his markings look like sunlight on the water. A moment more and all that is visible of him is the proud jut of his horn and a stream of bubbles on the surface, and then the ocean closes over his head and he is gone.
Samaira doesn't argue his statement, but she cannot help but also thing that greed is for the weak who feel too powerful. And that that is why they believe they have the right to take, and take, and take.
When he looks at her again, when their eyes meet, she does not miss the shift in his expression. Like ice beneath the warm sun, there is a softening to his expression and the pegasus thinks how much it suits him. A contrast to the winter chill of his skin.
And when he smiles, even for the predatory nature of the lips it curls, Samaira wonders how much ice she has managed to shave off. How much she has managed to chisel away, if any at all. He speaks and turns away from her and surges into the sea, powerful and swift.
'Look out for beasts.'
"I will," Samaira says softly to his disappearing shape, melding into the waves and the seafoam. She stays there for awhile longer—on that lonely shore—looking at the horizon and wondering if the shadows just under the surface are him or something else.
With a soft smile tugging at the corners of her lips, she too eventually turns away. But inside, she knows this will not be her last visit to the sea.
@Amaroq just a closer <3
we'll fulfill our dreams
and we'll be free
05-21-2019, 03:33 PM - This post was last modified: 05-21-2019, 03:34 PM by Samaira
![[Image: 13481303_KpOIcOG7drxHK9U.png?1556314753]](https://file.toyhou.se/images/13481303_KpOIcOG7drxHK9U.png?1556314753)
