could i use you as a warning sign - Isobell

[Ivar]

I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take Ivar had not hesitated. From the moment @[Isobell] acquiesces, he had never looked back. Loess has become nothing but a faint memory, a story to reflect on when the night sky stretched wide and black above them. Ivar can feel the warmth of Isobell dozing beside him and hear the quiet rhythm of her breathing. The jagged wound on his right side aches as he shifts his weight, but the piebald stallion grits his teeth against the pain and stands without any visible grimace. It stretches up from his belly, an unpleasant reminder that sometimes glaciers are sharper than they seem. He’d been careless, spiraling in excitement beneath a dozen feet of frozen ice. The cold and the salt water have done him good, but the scales have been slow to grow back. Fortunately, he has had other things to distract him, things like the softly swelling sides of the sleeping mare beside him. The kelpie reaches down to his resting mate, and presses a soft touch to the crown of her head. Since the moment Isobell had confirmed she was pregnant, Ivar has treated her as if she were as fragile as the first thin crust of ice on a still pond. The violent ravages of the autumn seems as distant as Loess, and Ivar has spared no effort to keep Isobell comfortable. Frozen ice was no place for an expectant mother, and so Ivar has guided her back south, where the water is warm and the hunting is plentiful. The kelpie had struggled for a while – why does his mate not appreciate the marlin he has brought her or the delicate conch he has pulled from the reef and cracked open on the shore? – but a quiet stretch of thick kelp forest and a rocky island have given them both what they need. Ahead of the scaled stallion, the vast expanse of the dark and open sea lies wide and unobstructed. He knows that Beqanna is there in the south, nothing more than a distant speck on the horizon. Nautical dawn has begun, and Ivar knows he has less than an hour before the sun rises (and with it, his dark haired mate). The kelpie steps away from Isobell, onto a bit of stone that he knows drops away into nothing a few feet from the edge. Leaping from a standing position is something the kelpie has perfected over his lifetime, a necessary physical skill to enter the water as quickly and efficiently as possible. In the minimal splash of his landing, there is only a brief flicker of a white-tipped and finned tail before Ivar disappears beneath the surf. The fish scatter at his arrival, but Ivar finds a sea bass that is slower than the rest. It stands no chance, and the pale faced stallion is swallowing the last of the crackling bones as he hauls himself back up onto their little rocky island. “Wake up, sleepy head.” He says, moving his muzzle to drip the warm sea water along the line of Isobell’s spine. Ivar is distracted by the way it drips around the growth at her midsection, and he presses his muzzle fondly to the sleek mother-of-pearl scales that protect their child. “Rise and shine.” king of loess minimal smoky grullo tobiano | equus kelpus