11-24-2019, 01:24 PM
 i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take The piebald kelpie rarely does anything with haste. There is no need to, not when he has everything he wants within reach. The weather is always perfect, the food is plentiful, the women are willing, and any danger is leagues away. Danger for his kind, that is – it’s not his concern if a few of the land-dwelling foals are lost to bull sharks. The sharks are good sport, he thinks, licking away an abrasive bit of skin trapped by his canines. One of his blue roans had looked startled by the rise of their fins as they’d lounged on the beach that that afternoon, and Ivar had been irritated enough by his unsuccessful search to take it out on the aquatic predators. It is that search which makes him move with remarkable briskness, slipping through the water with ease. Far sleeker than his land-dwelling shape, Ivar’s bejeweled, aquatic figure makes short work of the swim to the southern shore of Loess. These are waters that he once knew well, and the kelpie rounds familiar underwater features. He startles a blue tang from a shallow crevice, swallows it whole. Ivar had not eaten much of the sharks – their tough meat is not his favorite. The kelpie prefers his food herbivorous, like the tang and the docile mares on his island. Glancing overhead at the pearlescent pegasus that keeps pace in the air above him, the kelpie’s hunger rises. Patience is not a virtue he has had to cultivate these last few years, and it is a difficult one to relearn. He had nearly leapt from the water to grab her a time or two, to pull her down into the warm waves. But he did not, even though the need is great, and his aborted ascension from the waves became instead become playful cavorting. It would have been more impressive with full length fins, truly. But rather than sweeping and glorious as they might be on another, Ivar’s fins are worn and bitten short, most of it the work of the bull sharks the other day. They’d been large, and more numerous than he’d expected. The impenetrable scales of his sides and topline are without mark, but there are some scrapes along his tender belly, not to mention the destruction of his fins. There is nothing that dangerous in the waters here; here the danger remains on the land, and often in the sky. Ivar surfaces in the reddish shallows, climbing from the water with a shake of his dark head. The fins have disappeared, replaced by hard hooves and matted blue and white hair. The scales have gone this time too, replaced by fine and silky hair which he half-dries with another shake of his body. The kelpie keeps his teeth, pointed and glittering from the lips of a mouth that open far too wide. Other than that though, the tricolored stallion looks more equine than he has in a half-decade. He waits for Oceane to land (or finds her on the beach; she’d been a rather skillful flyer), and gives her one of his more charming smile. “Thank you again for offering to show me to Loess,” he tells her politely, wondering with a slightly narrowed golden eye how long it would take to gnaw the wings from her sides. They’ll make a nice addition to what the kelpie already collected. He’ll put them beside Jhene’s, Ivar thinks idly, the palomino spotted pair will accent them well. “Have you lived here long?” The question seems innocent enough, spoken just before he bends down to wipe a bit of sand from his foreleg. He is in no hurry to carry on, it seems, though he most waits to see how much she might remember of their earlier conversation. There is no predicting it. He knows sometimes they shake off the spell fairly quickly, but weaker minds are more willing to accept Ivar’s intrusive thoughts as their own. Both have their perks, and Ivar’s hunger rumbles again as he raises his head, ears pricked forward curiously to learn whether Oceane is an appetizer to what is coming, or if she is worth saving to enjoy afterward. Ivar doesn’t have a preference, not really; a meal is a meal. that if you talk enough sense then you'll lose your mind |
@[Oceane]