Thana
Hunger walks with her through the red-limestone with the walls that taste like dust in her teeth when she breathes. It lingers in belly like a snake devouring its own tail with an arthritic jaw. With each circle it makes her rib-cage ache and her muscles quiver with want. But instead of making her hollow and meek, the hunger makes of Thana a wild thing. 

She rarely talks when her shadow stretches out to tangle with another in the canyon. Each steps makes her more lean, more feral, more wanting. None of the shadows that tangle with hers stop her. They only look at the red unicorn with bolts of bone-white running down her face. They look at the blade dragging sharp lines in the dirt and look away as if she is nothing more than another hot breeze in the twilight.

Maybe they know she's wild. Maybe they can taste the 'other' on the air that gathers hot around her and makes her sweat. Maybe they know it's more than hunger that drives each of her steps on and on through the dusky shadows and red-rock.

There is no grass to wither and die at her hooves her, nothing tempting enough to taste (only to have it rot on her lips). The canyon hold in it's secrets nothing for her and that's why she lingers in the dust and heat. She doesn't notice though the way the rock crumbles around her blade as if a million sand-storms have passed in a moment. All she notices is red, red that swallows up her form when she lingers closer to the rocks reaching into the sky like towers. 

But ahead black breaks up that red and the dusk-darkness. The stallion's form is a suggestion of night, of blackness, that makes her think of that snake in her belly. Thana moves closer and her blade is still dragging tracks in the sand behind her. Her eyes lift, bright purple stones in a sea of red. She wonders if he'll look over her like she's a hot breeze or if he will try to see what sounds a wild, starving animal might make. 

Thana holds her breath like the waiting matters to her and she's not sure why.



"Death hath no dominion"

I'm tired of the weight of mortality.
I want to tear it from my bones,
until I bleed silver and gold.

aine drapes the shimmering, liquid silk — blacker than pitch — over his wing joints, and thinks of shadows.

Shadows darker than a reaper's kiss. Shadows thicker than hours-old blood. Will they come? he wonders, silver eyes narrowed in hesitation. Will they listen? The shadows are not used to being called by mortal boys with magicked scarves. The shadows are not used to listening to anyone but gods, and even those, they sometimes defy. So they resist, until —

"Audierunt autem umbrae," Caine murmurs, tongue gliding over the foreign syllables. May the shadows obey me. He shuts his eyes and thinks of nightmares and constellations. He thinks of a boy with a coat blacker than pitch.

In the sunless spaces of the Elatus Canyon, the shadows begin to stir.

When the first shadow slips against him, pressing into his feathers, Caine shivers. He had not expected for it to feel... cold. But a floodgate has been broken, and he inhales sharply when they rush to him, all at once. 

It feels a little like he is drowning. The shadows dance along his spine, prod against his legs. Tap against his mouth, but he snaps it firmly closed. Besides the chill, he does not feel much different. Not like when his illusions writhe in his chest like snakes. Alarm crawls into his throat when he wonders if the spell has failed.

Different magic behaves differently with every user, he reminds himself, silently reciting the opening lines of a grimoire he has memorized by heart. Magic chooses its master, and feasts upon the egos of men who believe the opposite. 

Has the shadow veil's magic chosen him? Exhaling, Caine opens his eyes and hopes that it has. 

It is nearing full noon now, the Solterran sun ascending to its highest peak. Light reflects off the crags of the red canyons, and, blinking, Caine looks out from the yawning mouth of the cave — 

And smiles in boyish delight when he sees the world in black and white. He has succeeded.

Caine wears a cloak of shadows, and a laugh pours from his lips like light. 

"Ego liberabit vos." I set you free. He feels the coldness leave him like a blast of frigid breath, and his silver eyes gleam like a mountain cat's when he watches the shadows melt like snow. A nifty trick he has gained. 

He is lost in thought, pondering the variety of ways he could spy on Raum's movements now that he has the cloak, when he feels it. The prickling of his spine, the buzzing of his innermost wings, that warn of something ominous approaching. The boy has only felt this feeling a handful of times before, and twice it had ended with a knife in his gut.

Silently, he unsheathes his dagger and keeps it pressed against his shoulder. He won't let a third knife touch any of his valued organs, not when he is so far from the capital. And he'll be damned if his corpse is found cooling in the desert, of all places. (His thoughts cut suddenly to Fia, to the aspilia flowers she had found so easily in the growth of the Oasis. But the Oasis is far, and he suspects that aspilia alone will not be enough for a mortal wound.) 

He starts to tuck himself deeper into the depths of the cave, when he sees her. 

At first, the red of her pelt is almost indistinguishable from the red of the canyon walls, and Caine's eyes struggle to trace the outline of her in the harsh rays of the sun. His dagger inches forwards, following the curve of his neck. The way she moves is wrong, too swift and leonine to be anything mortal, he almost thinks, before his own ridiculousness catches up with him. He has seen a god, and up close, they look less and less like a god and more and more like something mortal.

He is not afraid. (He has never learned to be afraid.)

So he approaches her, his footfalls silent, his eyes appraising. And the closer he steps, the more she becomes a girl, until she can be nothing else but mortal.

The startling amethyst of her eyes lift towards him, and Caine's breath catches in his throat. It is the first time he has ever seen it staring back at him.

Hollowness. 

He stares and stares. Is this what it looks like? And finally, his dagger forgotten, he speaks. "I had thought I was alone." He means alone, in the Elatus. 

(He does not mean alone, in the Elatus.) 

Thana
The longer she stares at him the more the blackness starts to blot out the red. It blurs together in her gaze, like a void. It ripples like water, currents of dark on dark. Thana thinks of home, of light and nothingness. She thinks about how the sea looks under a moon-less night, darkness and sea-foam that shines with dim starlight.

But what she thinks about the most, as she watches his shadows, is death.

So she walks closer to him with words rattling against her tight lips. Lightning is running down her spine and it's urging her in licks of electricity to move closer and closer. She wants to see what's under all that black rippling like water in the desert. Would it parch her thirst if she drank of it? Would it kill her? Would it taste like violence or like winter?

Thana moves closer and closer until the shadows of the canyon are singing through her hollow horn with the wind. It sounds somehow sweeter, that wind-song and shadow-song, like a tune she dreamed of once (if monsters dream at all they surely dream of moonless skies and black seas). She can almost see something again in that darkness, something that might be the thing she's looking for.

Just as she's about to reach out, and learn what shadows taste like, the blackness vanishes with a whispering language that means nothing to her. She almost cries out, almost begs all that darkness to stay just a little longer. Without the song of it the words seems almost dead, like she has killed it all just by daring to think of dreaming. Thana looks at him and feels-- feels something she has no name for. The shadows were easier to look at, they did not look back at her and speak.

“Never.” She says and the word has on it the flavor of ozone and gunpowder, like having that single word between them is a match against the darkness. Thana wonders what would explode if she dropped it. There is also one part of her that wonder why she's saying anything at all to the man below the blackness (or if what's she's saying makes sense to anyone but her). It's the darkness he wants not him; she wants a darkness to dream in.

When she walks closer her tail whispers against the stone and dirt, like that glint of a blade is whispering a secret against his skin. She wants to tilt her head towards him and tap her horn against it. She wants to laugh because someone has finally looked at her and seen the monster they should see. It feels like the answer to a prayer she didn't know she was chanting into the void.

She reaches out, wanting to touch the blackness. Thana wants to drown in it, let it devour her until there is not rot around her, only night. “What does the darkness feel like?” The ozone in her voice, waivers and thins, like the stars waiver below the glowing sun. For a moment she realizes how strange she must seem, following his darkness like a hound following a trail of blood.

Her next thought is that she doesn't care. She only wants to know if the darkness feels like that coil of winter laying her heart, scaled and glittering like a pale, poisonous snake.



"Death hath no dominion"

eyes deep like blackness
black like catastrophe
catastrophic like silence

ever,” she says, and it is an answer Caine had not known he’d wanted to hear until it lives and dies on her tongue. 

He says nothing, nothing at all, because he knows that is what she wants to hear. 

She is a lovely, deadly, wondrous thing. The Solterran sun, so fond of creatures like her, paints her redder than blood and halos her holier than seraphim. His eyes ache at the sight.

But he does not — cannot — look away. Closer and closer the girl (who is still mortal, still mortal) draws to him, that bladed tail gutting open the canyon floor. Dangerous, it hisses, like a snake. Monstrous, it sings, like a canary.

All Caine hears is the shh, shh of rain against a windowpane.

Her gaze cuts through him, sharper than the dragon-bone dagger pressed against the slats of his ribs. It slices hungrily through shadow and flesh and bone and comes out the other side, starved. He is not what she is searching for, is he?

The realization lights a gasoline-soaked smile to life.

“What does the darkness feel like?” The last of the shadows tears itself from his skin and slithers away, to a place he can never follow. Thana's obsidian-carved horn hovers precious inches from the white of Caine's eye, but he eases them closed anyways. Considering.

“Cold. Like ice, but without the burning. Ice burns because it damages you. But the shadows, they do not want to damage. They take.” A shiver creeps up his spine when he remembers how it had felt to be taken from. The feeling is not as unpleasant as it ought to have been.

“The absence of heat is cold. That is why death is cold,” he concludes, blinking away spots of black as his pupils shrink against the high-noon sun. The desert’s deadliest sun, bright enough to stun. 

Caine turns to her, suddenly, and forgets about her horn sharp enough to blind. 

“Do you want to feel it too?” His voice is as curious as only a boy’s — flourishing in an immortal youth — can be. 

(As only a boy — who has walked alongside death for so long he has forgotten how to be afraid — can be.) 

Thana
“I didn't know,” She starts but the words snag on her teeth like a lightning bolt finding itself moving through the crooked roots of an old oak tree. The force of it sparks white where the magic still hides deep down inside the chambers of her heart. Thana's skin twitches visibly like flies have set themselves upon her, as if she is an altar on which a dead sacrifice lies.

She inhales and the dust drags down her throat like she's swallowed every dune in Novus. “I didn't know that anything could take and not harm.” The sun shifting through the thin clouds traps itself upon her horn. Shadows pool at her feet in that pattern of hollow bone and it seems, almost, to say I would take from you. I would harm you. But Thana, when she looks at the white in the corner of his dark eyes, smiles sadly as if to whisper, I would not enjoy it.

Would he even understand when she's still looking at him as if the entire night sky is hiding on his skin and telling her to taste it?

Her horn cants itself away from him when he turns and the shadow of it slithers back into her own larger darkness like a snake slithering into a hole. Thana doesn't want to be a shadow, she only wants to drown in them until she's nothing, nothing, nothing. “Show me then.” The sun feels like fire on her back. It feels like small flames are licking across her hip until salt blooms upwards like furls of froth made into a mockery of petals. Fire is running wild across her skin but she's still full of winter, frost, and rot. She swallows and the desert air hurts.

Thana sidesteps closer, until she can feel the feathers of his wings whispering across the tight planes of her ribs. Each silken feather feels cool, not cold, like a spring blooming up from the dunes. This close she can taste the darkness in the air around him, like smoke and leather (as if the air around him could make her full where grass never has). Part of her wants to ask him if the air around her tastes like bone left out in a mighty storm, rain-washed and laced with char.

She leans into the feathers and the cool kiss of all that blackness.

“I want to know what it feels like to be cold.” Thana's not brave enough to tell him that she wants to feel what it that death feels. She wants to know how the forest feels as she walks through the trees and dappled sunlight.

But part of her wonders if she'll start to kill his shadows the moment they touch her skin.

How does the darkness die? Can it?



"Death hath no dominion"