amaroq
in his own country
even Death can be kind
even Death can be kind
A
maroq, too, knows how to read the stars. From the time he was a colt with no horn he would lay out on the winter ice and listen to the stories of the stars, the Bear and the Wolf and the Hunter and the dozens of others. They were lessons and guides both, and on clear cold nights a path seemed to open up, a trail between those paths of light. Oh, how many times he had dreamed of hunting in those midnight waters! And some midnights, when their breathing came in plumes and even the whales were sleeping and songless, Amaroq would see a glimpse of the beyond-world. Only ever the border of it, a shimmering, dancing curtain of green and blue and vivid purple, silent and eerie and so close.
One day he would pass beyond that curtain, one day his bones would be settled on the sea-bed as a home for small quick things in the dark but his soul, his soul would swim that great dark surf.
But he does not know the constellations so well here - the kelpie has learned the shape of them, but not the stories. And though it is near midwinter, though the wind howls cold in the mountains and the seals are thick with blubber, he has only seen faint traces of that curtain that marks the border to the after-world.
Tonight feels different. All day he has been unsettled, hunting in the surf and in the deep and catching nothing; last night the moon was crimson at the edges, a blood-trace, a promise. Today the clouds crept in, first stratus to whisper of change, then great thick sheaves of bruised blue, and even as a yearling Amaroq would know what it meant. A blizzard was coming, and blizzards meant change.
When the sky grows dark, when the first flakes drift like chaff from a threshing floor, Amaroq leaves the sea. Tonight is not a time to remain alone in the deep, listening to the whales sin the moon to black; his saltwater blood urges him inland as the snow covers his tracks, as the moon hangs sick and red. There are others, in the night, for it is a holy night even for the land-horses; but the unicorn approaches none of them. He is as a ghost in the storm, sea-grey and snow-white, and he drifts like ice upon the waves with the wind the only music in his ears.
Until he sees the star.
It should not be out - not when the snow is coming thick and fast, not when the winter wind is blowing on the trees and kissing every crevice with cold. But his pale eyes mark it as he falls, and Amaroq, too, begins to run. It is silent in the storm, silent in the snow, silent beneath the bloody dying moon - and he is not alone.
The snow turns red, cold embers from some unfathomable fire, and through this scatter of flakes steps a girl, the bells in her hair chiming like the howling blizzard, her skin seeming split with light like veins in the ice.
The unicorn stops. His breath comes in great plumes, and his neck is curved proud as a wolf’s, and his eyes do not leave her as she comes. He picks out the bones and seed-pearls in her hair as he feels the wind comb through his own, similarly adorned. He sees her eyes, pale ice-chips like his own, silver as stars.
The moon goes dead and dark; the night is lit only by those flakes like discarded stars, and by her strange and shining light. Amaroq does not smile but he feels his heart beating and beating, a wild drum, a savage hunting-song. He tilts his horn to her, grand as a prince extending his hand for a dance.
“Hello,” he says.
@Leto | he isn't very talkative, sorry
