[P] kiss me, and you will see how important I am;

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind At last it is winter.  The kelpie had begun to think that it never came here; summer crawled on and on, hot and thick, until it scorched the grasses brown and ran the creekbeds dry. Not until autumn showed its teeth in evening winds and laid its frost upon cold ground did Amaroq begin to hope.  And more than hope.  When the first flakes spun down like bits of stars he smiled on his lonesome stretch of beach and breathed out ice. When the first full moon of winter rose, huge and near as a world he might yet explore, the unicorn laughed as he rode the breakers and hunted seals among the midnight tide-pools. Oh, how hungry he was! Oh, how strong! Yet still alone.  It is a loneliness that eats at him, while being part of his own sharp hunger. It is a loneliness that verges on madness, that floods his mind with instinct and not reason. Now, in winter, it is a need and not a want, and it drives him up to shore, a lovely ghost among the horses that walk on land and do not dream in salt and tides.  He prowls like a wolf along the shale of the beach; he hunts like a unicorn up and down the coast. Frost follows in his tracks, ice climbs delicate as a spiderweb up his horn, forming lovely patterns too small to see. His need makes him bold; the winter and the moon make him beautiful.  There is snow on the black rocks of the shore when he finds her again (this girl who he has seen always from a distance), and the seagulls’ cries hang in the air even after they have passed. There is a mist over the water and though the sun is not yet set the moon is already up, a watchful eye. When Amaroq turns from it he sees her, and his horn points like a finger.  Careless of her spear and her wings and her cold basalt eyes he approaches, smiling like a wolf. Though he leaves some space between them his eyes beg her to come near, nearer yet, close enough that their skin might smell of salt together, close enough they might dream the same dreams (he has so many dreams to share). “You come so often to the sea.” He says to the girl. “Are you looking for god?”  @Marisol amaroq

[Marisol]

who are you
when it's all over?

“Do not,” she threatens, “speak to me of God.” 

It is too sensitive a topic. Even the word makes her skin crawl. She has lost too much in the name of God to speak of her so freely, less so to an entitled boy with knives for teeth. She cannot un-remember the way they looked at her during that meeting - the way they said she was insane to still worship Vespera, that she did not care about the commonwealth, that she was foolish for believing their God cared at all. But Marisol loves Her like she loves the way flying feels under her feathers, and there is no blood, nor tar, nor saltwater that can drown that feeling.

She is not sure why she came to him. It seems her reflexes have dulled, or are now willfully stupid. On her patrol down the rocky-dark beach she had caught a glimpse of him in the water shimmering in and out of vision like a star. And where she should have turned around, she instead kept moving, followed the mirage until it solidified into that strange, vicious man she had caught one day in the ocean. Oh, she should know better. She has seen his shark-smile. The blood on his chest.

And yet something in her - woefully, desperately begging to be loved - simply could not leave.

Anyway, she had followed his tracks all the way down. It is bitterly cold by the sea; his footprints are toothy with frost; Marisol’s short hair is crusted with salt, and she shivers against the frigid bite of wind. The black of the wet rocks is interrupted with streaks of pure snow. She has no reason to be here, but still she wants to stay.

Still she wants to talk to him.

But when he asks her about God, she almost regrets it. Her shoulders stiffen, her gaze narrows, her lip twitches a little, but still she stays there, cemented in place, and after a moment only shakes her head and snorts in a little derision. Her eyes are cold silver, mouth soft and unsure. Do not ask me about God, she says, and does not know what to say afterward.

It is the only thing she knows how to talk about.

credits

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind She is dark as a seal, dark as the wet rock she walks across, and it is not so hard to think that she could belong here. Not to a court, not to a god, but to the waves that sigh and crash and the wind that shrieks and the silence that comes as soon as you break below the surface. For once Amaroq does not feel out of place either. This world is his and he is both father and son to the ice around them, to the snow that threatens in a blue line on the horizon, to the whitecaps that look like horses lunging and vanishing out of the corner of his eye. Here he is at ease, his wariness made small by the cold and the hanging moon and the way all the sea-creatures know his name and fear it. She does not fear. He looks at her, the salty bristle of her hair like an indignant bird, the cold chips of her eyes. Almost he regrets his question when he sees her stiffen, and the tip of his tail begins to twitch like a snow leopard’s, but then she speaks. At her words and their cutting tone his smile carves further up his mouth like ice eating up a river. Fierce little wolf, little falcon, ruffling her feathers at him, lashing him with her tongue. The kelpie shrugs a dark shoulder beneath a seafoam-pale fall of hair and turns his gaze back out to the sea, half-hidden in mist like a world undiscovered. But it is she his attention remains on, from the seashell-curve of his ear to the hungry drum of his heart. “As you wish,” he says. “Then tell me of yourself.” @Marisol amaroq

[Marisol]

who are you
when it's all over?

The wind is bitter and bright around them; it sinks its teeth into Marisol and shakes, shakes, shakes, and she is suddenly jealous of the way Amaroq stands against it and feels no fear. 

How he loves the cold, and cannot shiver. 

How he does not have her same weaknesses. 

It would be reversed, she likes to think, in the sky: where she calls the wind currents by name, feels them out like the curves of a lover; where the cold doesn’t bite but kisses her, with all the reverence of something holy, or, worse, wanting.

In the darkness and the cold, Amaroq is like a shadow: even as she watches him (the pale fall of his hair, the sloping, black-ice shoulders) he seems to melt in the sea like he is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to the hungry waves all at once. Oh, to be beautiful. To be satisfied. Marisol cannot imagine.

Again she thinks of the sky, and dares to hope, woefully, it might swoop down to save her. She knows it will not.

There is a place at the edge of the world, just past the curve of Amaroq’s spine, where sky and sea melt into one. A place where the gray of the storm clouds melts like sugar into the black-blue of the ocean, easy and too-sweet, a place where there is no seam, but, instead, a kind of song - a dream that sings mournfully of how easy it is to get lost, if you’re willing to try, even if you aren’t;

Tell me of yourself, he says, and Marisol wonders what there is to tell.

I, she says, and pauses. Her eyes water against the wind. The slight gap in her mouth feels like a betrayal, or a mistake, or an opening to a portal she should not have let opened in the first place - God knows what will come out of it, now.

A used pair of wings, finishes Marisol bitterly, and she knits her eyebrows against the cold and the salt and the hot, black thing inside her that threatens horrible tears. It claws against the inside of her throat and her chest, it spirals behind her forehead; dizzy and nauseous, she bites out, A vessel for duty.

The truth always stings.

credits

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind She knows the currents of the clouds, the whims of the wind, the patterns there like threads that guide her through and through. She knows how quickly they can change, and what trouble they bring before it comes. The sea is no different. Amaroq has a name for each kind of current, for every curl of wave. He knows the water more intimately than a lover, knows the migration of each bird and the hiding-place of the seals. The unicorn can recognize each whale’s song, and when they are lonely, and when they are glad. And he loves it, fiercely and completely, even though it does not make him whole. Up and up rush the waves, to cover his heart, but there is a pocket there in the rock and the ice of it that is nothing but hollow. Still he thinks himself joyful, still he knows he is proud - is it not the same for her? The kelpie waits to hear what she will say of herself, with his gaze still trained on the sea - on that same seam of horizon she watches. A meeting between two worlds that are not so different, two worlds the land-horses will never understand. And though his expression remains impassive, at her answer - so bitter, shattered ice, summer berries withered black - his tail begins to twitch behind him like a leopard’s, impatient. Amaroq does not look at her, for if he did he might show his teeth. “Is that all?” At last his voice is cold, almost cruel - the touch of a frigid wave and then the receding of it, dismissive. There is more in the spaces between his words, in the pause after them, in the cold that hangs between them like the mist. I thought there was something else. Surely you are not so empty. And the greatest thing he does not say (the thing that makes him wonder if he was wrong, as he watched her high on the cliffside with her spear and each time he caught the glimmer of her iron gaze or a flash of the snowy underside of her wing) - I could make you so much more. @Marisol amaroq

[Marisol]

who are you
when it's all over?

That is all. That is all there is, right? Duty, the smell of blood, the hug of the hard edge of her spear to a patch of skin -  there is nothing to her but the tattoo of her heart that says Halcyon, Halcyon, Halcyon, and for the first time that Mari can remember that tattoo cannot make her feel whole.

She watches him and holds back a sob. The smell of salt stings her nostrils and burns a web against the inside of her chest. He is beautiful, and the beauty is what makes him dangerous, the ice-blue eyes, skin dappled in shades of sea and rock; if Mari were not careful she could fall in love with him, or something like it. (She is sure plenty of other people feel the same, and more sure still that Amaroq does not care for it.)

Since childhood, her merit has not been in beauty, but coarseness and violence.

It is hard to imagine anything different.

What is the point, anyway? Since birth she was not the princess but the sword, and there is no reason to think she will ever be anything different. Her fate is stamped on her as obviously as the stripes of white on the back of her wing. There is no escaping it: she made her choice, all those years ago, when she first painted them across her dark feathers, and now she is obliged, by God or duty or tradition or something similarly stupid, never to take them off.

His voice is as cold as the wind and the waves, and when Marisol shivers she is not sure if it is the weather or the acid in his tone that makes her uncomfortable. I - her throat closes around the word, and she blinks furiously against the tears and the breeze. The wind whips her short hair into a frenzy. Her shoulders stiffen. I don’t know. 

It is shame, then, that stops her from saying anything else.

credits

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind He is no prince to tip her chin up and tell her she is lovely. He is no hero, to show her all the ways that she is more than her violence, that there are weapons that can be used in more ways than war. See the ocean, he might say, how beautiful it is, how strange, how savage you must be to survive it! All lovely things in his world possess fangs and claws and a beating, bloody heart, and oh, how joyful they are for them! The point of his horn draws an arc over the horizon, and he breathes through flared nostrils the frigid winter wind sweeping in across the water. She does not say enough that Amaroq can hear the tears choke her throat but he can see, out of the corner of his eye, the way that she shivers with more than the wind. He does not hide his disappointment, the way his tail begins to curl and uncurl and sweep patterns in the sand, the way the bones and pearls knotted in his hair whisper against each other of his anger. You have so much, he wants to tell her. Why are you afraid. If he knew her at all - if he knew even her name - he might make such demands of her, the way friends do. But Amaroq is not her friend, and he welcomes the cold, breathes deeply of it, knows it could never match his own frigid, lonely soul. When he looks at her at last it is not her he sees at all, but every warrior with a spear-point and a cruel heart that hunted his people - yet claimed to be empty, pretended to be lost. Anger rises in him like a coming wave, dredging up the dark sea-floor of his heart, mingling with the magic in his saltwater veins until ice slicks itself along his sides, crusting with salt in the thin crevices of his horn. His eyes are hard as gleaming pearls, and so too are his teeth when he finally bares them. In a burst of movement that shatters the ice blooming around him like asters in the sand, Amaroq lunges toward her. His mouth is opened wide, wide, wide, like a bear, like a shark, like a monster, revealing neat rows of teeth splendid and sharp. And when the kelpie reaches for her throat he doesn’t know if it is to kill her - or to force her to live. @Marisol amaroq

[Marisol]

who are you
when it's all over?

If he were a prince she would not want him. Marisol is tired of princes. And princesses. And kings. She is tired of the whole system, its archaicness and the way it has infiltrated every part of her life, everything from designing the paint on the back of her wings to affording her her title. It has designed her beloved spear, it has given her a cold, lovely name: but it has also shorn her hair and iced her blood and left her with a jaw that aches to tear, not chew, and turned her heart to terrible stone. There is not a piece of her that has not turned hard. She resents herself for it.

Almost, she does not notice his aggravation. Her eyes are fixed on a middle point somewhere far over the edge of the world where the sea blends with the sky; the clouds and the waves seem more important than the way Amaroq’s tail lashes over the sand. The black rocks behind them shine with the new spit of the tides. And the cold does not seem so important now that she is fully entranced by the way the ocean stretches out a million lengths ahead of them. It is infinite. It will be here long after they have gone and has been here eons before. How beautiful! How wonderfully infinite! Nothing alive now will ever compare - 

It is that knowledge, heavy as a rock in her chest —  total dread — that keeps her pinned in place as the world starts to close in.

The sharp gleam of Amaroq’s teeth. How his eyes harden like chips of pearl. Marisol’s heart, like a fist, tightens in her throat: as if in preparation it beats faster and faster and faster, blood rushing just underneath her skin with new voracity, chokes her head to blackness, almost, and she thinks she might be falling even before his mouth closes around the satin of her throat.

When it does, it almost makes her feel more alive than before.

Those needle-sharp teeth sink into her veins. Pain shoots all the way from her chest to the back of her skull, so sharp and hot Marisol cannot decide whether to scream or cry and so she does both, choking with an awful, wet-with-blood noise on the cry that tries to escape from between her clenched teeth. Even in her blind panic the years of training haunt her like a ghost. She knows better than to twist or turn, knows that it will cleave her in half like butter; instead she smashes out toward him with a front hoof and they come apart like two comets pulled away by black holes. 

Her head is black. Her vision tunnels. She stumbles on the wet black rock. Blood trickles down her throat and pools in the back of her mouth, hot red salt, and her breaths are garbled with the wet sound of it. Her mouth opens:

By Her hand, Marisol gasps, and plummets into the water.

credits

[Amaroq]

in his own country Death can be kind The taste of blood transforms him like an invocation. At the first tang of copper and salt on his tongue his teeth lengthen; where before they were a snag for the eye, a subtle threat, now they are menacing, the jaws of a leopard seal. They are built to catch fish but they work just as well for for foolish throats and thrashing wings. His pale eyes widen, the flat regard of a shark. The blow of her hoof peels them apart like a mussel-shell. He is silent against her wet gasping, her choked cry. The only noise the unicorn makes is when he plunges into the water after her, and even that is such a small thing against the thrash of the surf and the screaming of the gulls. She is easy to follow, trailing dark blood that wisps on the currents and bubbles that stream from her like a veil. Her wings flash bright as snow beneath the cold water, bright as the belly of a killer whale. It is nothing for him to reach her, despite any thrashing of her limbs. Nothing for him to seize onto her neck or wings, to flood his mouth with blood or feathers. The water foams around them with little bits of ice like lace as his fetlocks become fins and the kelpie begins to drag Marisol down and down into the cold and the dark. Oh, he is meant to be the monster: it becomes him as well as winter does, all his elegant lines becoming savage. He still doesn’t know if he should kill or save - but then the thought of another warrior-girl snags him like kelp. She had wanted the change that he offered, he had seen it in her eyes and in the curve of her neck and in the way she furiously fled.   The girls’ wings may be thrashing, her hooves striking him again and again on his chest, his sides, an urgent drum on his skin. But Amaroq is built for a life in frigid waters and sleeping on sea-ice and his hide is thick as a whale’s. She will leave nothing more than bruises on him here, in his element, and drowning-deep. She is running out of time. @Marisol amaroq