Thana is standing in a ring of death like a sun burning with nothing but blackness and emptiness around it. Her skin is red, red, blood-red in light filtered through the smoke. Somehow this is the first moment in which this world makes her look like she belongs. The wind is crying like a hawk through her horn. Her blade is flashing in the sunlight, like a caught star, as she flicks it back and forth, back and forth (like the metronome of a predator). Each blade of dune grass that the winter did not kill is rotting from the roots.
All the blackness, and sand, and metronome song makes her shadow seem like it stretches out further behind her the it should. It races across the ground until it peaks and dissolves into sunlight. Her shadow looks like a volcano ready, ready, ready to become a monster like the one far out to sea.
Asterion is ahead of her, with a unicorn at his side and a dragon over his head. Part of her wants to join them, to look that other unicorn in the eye and understand what it means to be a beast with a horn upon it's brow. Another part of her wants to shed her skin like a crocodile and drag the king out to sea, deep enough that the waves, bending in spires away from him, refuse to listen to a man with stars on his skin.
It would be dark there, and silent.
She's tired of closing her eyes and seeing only brightness, only blinding water that goes on, and on, and on. Thana doesn't know what it means anymore, all these wicked wants creeping along her insides like ivy until they bloom in the space behind her eyes. She's hollow and wanting . She wants to lift her head towards that volcano moaning in the distance and scream back a battle-cry that says, I understand, I understand, I'm exploding too.
But she's still looking at the king who's insides she wants to carve poetry across deep down in the black sea, where the brightness can't find either of them. She wants to kill him; she wants to drag him back from the shore to the world that's not beating eaten by smoke.
She does neither.
Thana turns away and prays to whatever monster is living in the center of the island. She begs it to take the soul she cannot bring herself to taste with all the sharp edges of herself.
***STAFF EDIT
@thana has rolled a 4! She has been awarded +80 signos
