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.



and i'll use you as a warning sign
that if you talk enough sense then you'll lose your mind

Nearly a decade has passed since the tobiano stallion had last seen Loess from this shore. The place is little changed; perhaps the red dunes have shifted and a bit more of the stone crumbled away. It would be easy to forget that he would not find Heda resting in the foothills or Trissy frolicking in the springs. The short days of autumn when he would find Isobell on these shores, driven from Nerine by the instinct he’d awakened in her, are long gone. Would they have brought her back to Ischia, he wonders, if he had the patience to wait for the fall?

Probably, he thinks, there is nothing stronger than instinct. His mate knows where she belongs, knows to whom she belongs. His coming here will only hasten her return, Ivar decides, and provide a bit of fun in his otherwise blissfully monotonous life. The longer-longer-scaled creature turns his golden eyes back to that bit of fun, who is telling him that she has lived here half a year. Ivar nods, only partially listening. Most of his attention is on Oceane herself, on her quick heartbeat and uneven breathing. They draw him closer, even though they might be just the result of exertion, but before he has a chance to taste the difference, the opalescent mare is turning away.

She’s leading him to the springs, she says. The distance she keeps between them feels almost purposeful, but as they are heading toward water, Ivar doesn’t truly mind.

What he does mind is the addition to their company, and the sound of beating wings overhead. He draws to a halt, and the scowl across his handsome face lightens when he recognizes the tobiano that lands beside them. There are worse additions he can think of, and while Ivar does follow the possessive way Castile draws near to Oceane, he returns the dragon’s smug grin with an amused curve of his own mouth. That part of Oceane is rather delicious; its no surprise that Castile thinks the same.

“Oceane is showing me Loess,” he tells Castile with a roll of his shoulders. It feels odd without the fins there, and Castile’s mention of his hooves draws another crooked smile. “I didn’t want to awe too many of your women with my other shape,” Ivar answers, well aware of the cocksure tone of his voice. The two pied stallions are alike in that, exuding bravado without being truly aware of it. Fortunately for both of them, Ivar is not inclined to find out which of them might come out on top in a scuffle. He is not threatened by Castile, at least on an instinctive level, and the season is wrong to be battling over women. Castile has always been willing to share his leftovers anyway, and Ivar is not especially picky about where his meals come from.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where my wife is, would you?” He asks the dragon. “I’m afraid she’s wandered off and gotten lost away from the sea.”


and i'll use you as a warning sign
that if you talk enough sense then you'll lose your mind

Ivar is not a good husband, but he is a predictable one. Ivar hadn’t given Isobell a say in the matter, but the kelpie knows that she could have chosen far worse when it came to a spouse. The piebald mare is precious and treasured and valuable to him. Her wants and needs are always taken care of (so long as they do not contradict whatever Ivar might want at the moment). Isobell’s children are his favorite children, her rocky cave the one to which he always returned to at dawn no matter how far he had strayed the night before. Ivar has given her everything that she could have ever wanted, and she still had the audacity to think she could leave him without a word.

The nights that Isobell refused Ivar a place in their cave were always the most dangerous nights – at least for the other women of their little island. The kelpie was always less cautious in his frustration, and eager to take out his irritation on anything he could find. He’d killed Jhene on such a night, shredding her golden body into pieces too small even for her immortality to save her. Breckin had died on another, and Mallek, and a few others whose names he had never learned. Since Isobell’s depature from Ischia, there have been far fewer children born from his mares. It is not that he’s forsaken them – the very opposite. When he is satiated, it is enough to watch his offspring grow in their mothers. When he is hungry, they are just something extra to drown.

Ivar does not handle denial well. He’s too impatient, too impulsive.

He would have killed Oceane this morning if she’d not smelled of Isobell. A chance encounter (Ivar’s sapphire brow quirks upward at Oceane’s use of the word ‘convince’, and he glances at Castile with a somewhat knowing twist curling his mouth) had saved her, and now Castile’s presence further impedes his plans. Even Isobell’s arrival cannot permanently delay the inevitable, but all thoughts of the opalescent mare disappear the moment he lays eyes on his wife. Ivar cannot look away, though he scowl does deepen as Isobell makes no effort to greet him first, instead gliding up to embrace both her brother and Oceane before making her way to him. He smiles at her, but it does not meet his eyes.

You’re going to regret this, his metallic gaze says, even as he presses a kiss to her cheek. It is barely more than polite, but he’d seen the way her nostrils flared when she’d seen him, the way she’d fought against their bond. She’s his still, and he will remind her of that bond the moment they are alone. Ivar considers simply commanding her to feel regret with his magic, but that wouldn’t really teach her the lesson he wants her to relearn. “Not as much as you missed me,” he tells her instead, his voice pitched low for her ears, though likely still audible to the others.

[You did miss me] he adds through the places where Isobell’s scaled side brushes against his haired one. It’s only ever been the opposite before, some small part of him realizes – his scales against her silky hair. There are a few more things said without words, secrets between a man and his wife, reminders of their nights together and their many nights apart. When he pulls away, his vision is blurred for a moment, and the kelpie shakes his dreadlocked mane while he waits for it to clear. Almost all the seawater has dried out of it, though a few cool drops splash down along his sun-warmed sides.

“There’s not many things that could make me leave the ocean, let alone come back to these ugly mountains,” Ivar replies to Castile’s assessment of his visiting as nice.

“Your sister forgot to tell me she was visiting you,” the kelpie continues, “and I was starting to get worried that she’d forgotten the way back home.” So I’m here to remind her, is left unsaid, though only because Ivar knows that Castile will understand. Isobell belongs to him in every way that matters, and she is Ivar’s to do with as he will regardless of her familial connection to Castile.

“Has anything happened since I left you here with…” There’s the very briefest pause, a struggle to come up with the name of a child he’s not thought of in ages, “Lepis? She’s what: 3 or 4 now?” Ivar’s awareness of passing time is clearly much altered; more than a dozen years have passed since he settled on Ischia where there were no years, only days with more or less rain. “The place pretty much looks the same.” Ivar’s bright eyes flick out across the hills that rise into red mountains around them, breathing in the almost-forgotten tang of fresh and salt water all at once.


and i'll use you as a warning sign
that if you talk enough sense then you'll lose your mind