12-26-2017, 03:59 PM
 i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take Kylin asks if his father had been a water creature, and Ivar nods. The clearest memories of his father are those beneath the water. “A kelpie”, he replies though his eyes remain out to sea. He can feel Kylin resting beside him (not by her warmth – this place is too tropical for that – but rather by the shift in the wind that plays with the drying strands of his dark mane. Perhaps his father is still out there, lost in the sea. Ivar does not think of him often, but he does now. The piebald creature was an aberration, the result of magic interacting with animal instinct in an entirely unexpected way. He’d nearly killed his mother at birth, and he knows that she regrets him. Not enough to avoid the danger of his father though; no one is ever strong enough to avoid the danger of a kelpie. He does not like the direction that these thoughts are heading, and so he distracts himself instead of dwelling further on them. Instead he leans to the side, pressing his pale shoulder to Kylin’s side where she lays beside him. Her gentle compliment brings a smile to his pale face, and he places a gentle kiss on her outstretched nose. “My mother is back in Nerine these days. My father is out to sea, where kelpies belong.” The irony in his statement does not escape the black and white stallion. His own home is far from the saltwater, yet as he reclines in the sand it is almost easy to forget. There is a bit of seaweed in Kylin’s mane, Ivar sees, and he reaches out to brush it away. Once he has, he does not pull away, but rather rests his neck across hers, trying to draw her a bit closer to him with a gentle tug. Ivar can’t recall if he’s ever told Kylin what his father was before – what he was – but he is entirely unconcerned. She isn’t in any danger, after all (at least not in danger of anything with permanent consequences). The brown-eyed creature will not break his promise to the lavender mare, but there are times when it would be easy to. Times like these, he thinks as he traces the fall of her still damp mane down her pale neck. She tastes of seaweed and saltwater, a delicious concoction, and the thrum of her still-rapid-from-the-race heartbeat is enticing in ways that she would not understand. She is innocent of these ways, he knows, though rumor would suggest that her purple family might have taught her early. The need to sink beneath the water, to watch her last breath shatter the surface with bubbles overhead, to drink of her blood until all he can see or smell or even think of is Kylin. No. Ivar stops himself, though a gentle brush at her shoulder is but an inch away from a bite to make her his forever. He lets out a long sigh, deeper than he’d intended, but hides it in a motion to stand. In the blink of an eye, his tail is legs again, pale and muscular and fetlock-deep in water. It is always safer for them when he is farther from the water. “I want to see more of Ischia.” Ivar tells her, his brown gaze carefully focused on the dark green of the jungle ahead and determinedly not on Kylin. “Let’s avoid the hibiscus if we can, though.” Adds the scaled creature, the reference to his first trip to the island bringing a bit of humor to his tone. “What else is there to see here?” minimal smoky grullo tobiano | equus kelpus |