YOU SYMBOLIZE THE GRITTY EDGES OF MY OUTRAGE LIKE SALT - I grind you into my wounds and you bite like salt
The tide drifts inward as a river – a curve like a sickle, cutting through stiff lines of shore, and, further inland, muddy gorge. In the deep center of the estuary, where the water is darkest, the sharp curve of a fin breaks the surface. The pale lash of a tail. Bull shark, Locust thinks (no, knows) as she watches it slice through the grey skim of waves with surgical precision. She finds the movement admirable, though she knows it is what it is meant to do; even when she swam, and she dares not swim anymore, she never had a choice but to fight the water.
Her knife hangs in the air in front of her, twirling around the curves of her invisible, telekinetic fingers absentmindedly. (She scarcely even looks at it.) Each revolution is a sharp click; a nervous twitch that she developed sometime in childhood.
It is high tide, and the rising sun is red. It hangs on the horizon, a thick glob of magma which makes the bobbing waves look like flames, rippling with distant heat. Behind her, it is still night; the world is dark blue, nearly dark enough to seem black, and the faint, hazy outlines of the stars and a disappearing sliver of moon remain visible even to the naked eye. The world is two-tone, the very contrast an act of violence – and, though she has seen many dramatic sunrises while out on the sea, where the water is sometimes so flat and calm that one can see for several miles in any direction, this one feels unnatural to her. The ocean is not itself. She has spent time in these waters, on one boat or another, but it feels unrecognizable.
She is not yet sure what that means. It is not like being on foreign shores; it is like being on something that is not a shore at all, even as she stands with her hooves just-buried in the pale lick of salt, barely out of reach of the ocean’s hungry mouth. She knows that the water will climb no higher, so she stands dangerously close to its briny tendrils, like a free man come to taunt a chained prisoner.
There are certain times when, in her line of work, Locust can almost forget the way that her stomach drops when she stands too close to the sea. This is not one of those times. The shark disappears beneath the current, and, a moment later, she thinks that she sees a splash of red drift to the surface.
(As a girl, hadn’t she swum with sharks? But that was so long ago now – god, she was getting old.)
She has encountered others on this island, while she has searched for one thing or another, but they have not lingered for long; there is a part of her that wishes that she’d brought a few members of her crew along with her, but another, more reasonable part of her knows that they lack the spine of the Sea Star. Most were relatively young and inexperienced, and, with no loyalty or obligations between them, they were apt to spook at the first sign of danger.
The island, of course, was dangerous. She was not yet sure if it was the danger of something cursed or something blessed. The natives told stories of their gods, but she was not a religious woman; blind faith was worthless, and even that which you saw with your own two eyes was often untrustworthy. She was not sure if the distinction mattered – regardless of whether it was cursed or blessed, she was neither native nor believer, and she hadn’t come here for blessings besides.
She had come here for August, or for the possibility of some kind of treasure, both of which, she supposed, she could consider blessings – but she had also come to the island because, like the song of a siren, dangerous things had always called to Locust, and she had discovered that it was always best to seek them out, rather than let them find her.
The knife turns. Clicks. She watches the water, which still does not feel to her like water should, and she wonders what she is hoping to find.
(Perhaps, somewhere in the distance, she sees something stir.)
There is something wrong with all of it, he knows, but the overworld, the one of trees and wind and chaotic noise, is still none of his concern. But the water -
He’d tried to slip into it, from the bridge and then from the shore, a cove hidden away from the unicorn statue and all the horses gathered with their incessant talking. But even knee-deep with the current just beginning to tug him away Amaroq had felt the wrongness of it, the way it slid around his skin in a texture unfamiliar. He had seen a few places where lava still ran red and steaming into the bay and he had heard the cries of creatures enormous and alien.
The kelpie knows that he should leave. He misses the cold of deep black water, misses the lull of a world silent but for whale-song and the laughter of the seals, hates the crawl of humidity across his skin and the cacophony of color and sound. But there is power here, there is a magic that calls to his own. There is prey that has never seen a hunter. And there is his own curiosity, as sharp as his hunger, as easy to feed.
Sunrise, high tide, waves beating against the rock - these things draw him from the dark heart of the forest, a world of black and phosphorescent blue, almost familiar. The kelpie follows a stream back to the sea, but he pauses with the treeline a dark wall behind him at the sight of a silhouette on the shore. She is only a black shape with the sunrise before her, but he can see the glint of her knife as it rises and falls, rises and falls, catching the sunlight and flashing silver, flashing red.
As if hooked by the tip of the blade, the line of his mouth carves into a grin. When he steps forward again his steps are easy, his head is low, his long spiral of horn draws circles against the red sunrise. The woman’s hair and his own is the same, pale as seafoam or cloud. Only when she turns a little does he see the spikes along her back. Amaroq cannot know what she is, but he does know a dangerous thing, when he sees it.
He stops before he reaches her, hooves sinking into silt, so that she is caught between him and the frothing tide. His eyes do not leave her; he cares nothing for sharks.
“A red morning means a storm,” he says, offhand, and does not take his gaze from the woman bathed crimson by the dawn.
I SHOULD HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A KNIFE the times without blood on my hands, a weakness.
When the kelpie emerges from the forest, Locust is almost unsurprised. Almost, because this island seems to attract all manners of predatory, sharp-toothed creatures, and a kelpie is certainly a predatory, sharp-toothed creature. Almost, because, since the incident with the tree, she has decided it is best to expect the unexpected. Almost, because she is so close to the sea and a bright red sky.
But there he is, striding out from the trees like a pale shadow. The knife, suspended in mid-air in front of her, stills abruptly. It drifts to her side, then holsters itself smoothly at her leg.
She sees his teeth before anything else, but she does not allow her gaze to linger on their sharp points; he is bold, to be grinning so easily, so unwarily. Perhaps he thinks that he has her cornered. Perhaps he simply hasn’t realized that there are hungrier things in this world than water-horses, and she is among them.
She is between the devil and the deep blue sea, Locust thinks, with a hint of amusement – though this sea is far from blue, and the devil is as mortal as she. A red morning means a storm, he says, and Locust smiles back at him. It is almost an intimate thing; the toothless curl of her lips is deceptively warm and welcoming, in spite of the cold, hard thing taking form inside of her throat. Her eyes trail slowly – deliberately – along his frame, taking in the extent of his coat.
He is a beautiful creature, with a coat like some arctic seal; if she weren’t sure that his coat would fetch a wonderful price at market, she would be tempted to keep it for herself. (It looks soft and sleek, so wonderfully plush.) His mane is a cascade of tumbling sea-foam, riddled with braids, and the long, long horn which spirals from his forehead is like a spear of ice. He is powerfully-built, and much taller than she, and, if she weren’t just as much a predator as he, Locust might have been cowed by his superior strength. As things were, she is more interested in his eyes.
They are such a bright, cold blue that they strike her even from a distance.
She pretends that she does not notice their carnivorous gleam.
Her lashes dip low over the oceanic blue-green of her eyes, and she inclines her head, the white coils of her mane falling across her forehead. The pearls which dangle from her skull rub together and clink sharply. “So,” Locust says, still eyeing his grey, grey coat, “are you supposed to be the storm?” Her voice could almost be a lover’s, in the way that it comes out all deep and breathy and seems to want for something.
And oh, she wants for something – a killing can be an act of intimacy, too. She draws a bit closer, her head still cocked at that inquisitive angle. “You look a bit like one,” she adds, her tone as chipper as it is innocuous. Those teal eyes narrow abruptly, scrunching up with something akin to confusion. “Your teeth,” she says, then, as though she is noticing them for the first time, and it comes out as a question rather than a statement. “Are you one of the island creatures, too?”
She takes another step forward. Then another. Rather like, she thinks, a girl who has never seen a wolf before, and hasn’t realized that she should fear its teeth.
@Amaroq || or, Locust plays dumb while thinking about how best to butcher his carcass. "Speech!" ||
e notes the way she looks back at him, for her eyes are sea-bright, jewel-bright, even when the rising sun makes a halo behind her. Amaroq does not care for it, the way that sharp gaze measures him like meat. It has been a long time since he has been looked at in his way (a thing already dead, and only then of value), but he remembers it, and the way his people were slaughtered, and he closes his lips over his teeth before they become a snarl. The grin fades like ice melting, leaving no trace.
It is easy to fall still, then, except for the slow cold of his breathing, and the way his ears twist back at the sound of her pearls clinking together as though in echo of what is woven and braided into his own long skein of hair. He wants to grab her by that string of pearls, and twist her head around to bare her throat. He wants to remind her that she is smaller than he is, and if they are both predators than he is the stronger.
“No.” The word is flat, coldly derisive.
The stranger steps nearer, too fearless, and he dips his head so that the point of his horn shivers like a promise between her sea-colored eyes. Closer again she draws, and his gaze is steady on the knife sheathed at her side, remembering the practiced way she’d been tossing it, light glinting off its edges. Only when she says your teeth does he flick his attention up, and he bares them for her then, glinting like light on water.
She knows him, just as the other mare with stripes like a tiger’s and eyes like fire-light had known him. But her questions do not seem as honest, and Amaroq is disinclined to answer.
Instead he steps forward, too, and they are like two partners readying to dance; there is a tautness between them that can be cut, and the water glows red behind her. The kelpie is calculating the differences between them - the three hands he has over her, the thick of his muscles beneath their layer of blubber. He keeps his head low, guarding his heart.
