Thana
The wind should feel like a promise of horror against her skin. Each grain of sand should feel like a bullet of dust when it slams into her like a million, small needles hungry for blood. The storm, the howling wind, the way the sand sings of death and destruction should make her feel anything but free.

But it does. It does. It does.

It feels like freedom whipping against her in lashes of sand and dark promises. Each howl of wind makes her smile brighter, and brighter, until it's ivory slashing through her red lips instead of teeth. Thana feels monstrous and feral. She feels like death magic and rift magic formed into flesh. She feels more whole than she has ever felt in this world she's searching endlessly.

Her hooves carry her fearlessly through the storm. She doesn't know to be cautious of the sand, of the dunes ripping at her ankles that might swallow her whole. All she feels is freedom and wildness and she laughs when the wind rips at her smile like claws. Below the wind the groaning starts, and she can feel the sand roiling beneath her with something other than wind and storm-promise.

Thana can feel then how hungry that thing rolling in the sand is. She can feel it pulsing through the sand like a heartbeat. It's a hunger she knows for it beats and sing and rages in the hollow places in her body. She recognizes it in the way that all monsters can sense each other in the darkness. There is no need to see the teeth to know they are there waiting.

She lowers her horn and her blade whines at her back when she swings her tail round and round like a hanging rope at her back. The wind still feels like freedom cracking against her skin. Everything about her is ready and waiting, like a lion poised in the tail grass with a dry, aching tongue that needs to be cooled with death.

Just as she's ready to step closer to the pulsing coil beneath the sand something collides hard and fast with her. It doesn't feel like freedom whipping against her now but war. She screams and whips around, the running and the storm made her too feral to turn his words quickly into meaning.

At first it's only her horn between them when she spins. Then it's her teeth pulled back in a lion's snarl. Her tail arc behind her like a cobra and her blade glints in what sunlight makes it through the sand spinning furiously behind them. But her fury cools almost as soon as it started because she she cannot taste whatever it is she's hunting for on his skin. “Why?” She says the moment she can make sense of his words through the freedom wind and her own fury.

She's still looking at him, tracing the spiral of his horn with her gaze. She's wondering who has the stronger horn. But the keening rises it pitch behind her and she trembles with the excitement with war. Thana swings her horn back towards the monster in the sand. It's grotesque and it rises a flood inside her when she looks at those strange teeth hanging in the black cave of its mouth. Her own teeth flash like stone as she sneers back it at.

Monster. Her heart beats out the name.

I know you. The wind whistling through her horn sings.

Shall we see which of us is the better beast? The blade on her tail asks in sharp sighs and glints of light on the tip of it.

Thana steps closer and the wind between her teeth still tastes like freedom.




"Death hath no dominion"

Thana
Each kneeing cry rattles through the chasm of her body and dances off her bones like song. The death magic in her rises to meet it, rot to violence, hunger to instinct. She doesn't know why she wants to drink of this monster, why she wants to devour each shred of magic that makes it so grotesque. But she does, oh she does. She wants to gut it and carve warnings into his scale with teeth and horn.

It strikes and she's bracing and ready. Her horn is lowered and the wind is still crying a war-trumpet through the hard hollows of it. Thana is almost eager watching that gaping jaw start to lower, but it passes right by her and hits the stallion who collided with her.

She's furious.

Her own sharp trill challenges its keening cry, a trumpet of fury that came from another unicorn. It feels like a lion of war-song living in her lungs, it burns and burns even as she screams it out. Even as she screams she watches him dance out of the way. Unicorns, She thinks, because she's not really one is she? Thana knows she is nothing more than a beast with death in her bones and a horn upon her brow. There is no innocence in her, not really, how can there be?

This war is what she's made for, to kill monsters and devour their horror. To drain magic from bodies like a leech draining blood. There is magic in her genetics that made monsters worse than this: bears with stone eyes, beasts that devoured memories like air, pillars of amber in which monsters waited with wide eyes.

What is a sand-beast to her, but dead?

So she watches it prepare to strike. She watches the way the stallion's gaze looks at her and pleads, save me. Everything slows down as if the death magic in her blood is slowing her own heart. Beat by beat she watches him and she watches the beast, and she is waiting. She's coiled like a snake too, and she's just as hungry as one.

It lunges, wide-jawed and furious. Thana lunges to meet it. She's smiling beneath its shadow, a fierce-white smile full of hate and need. It arcs above her, aiming for the stallion standing like a stone waiting for death. She had hoped it would choose the easier kill, she's not disappointed. Laughter boils like hot water at the back of her teeth. Everything in her is still screaming, freedom, freedom, freedom.

Thana runs at the belly of the beast with her horn and her tail raised. The sharp tips of each glint in the sunlight and the sand like small stars. Sand is still blowing against her like small needles and her vision is blurry with it. Each blink only makes it hurt more but even the pain still makes her think of freedom.

She remembers then that she's angry (she's forgotten why). Thana leaps as high as she can with sand at her hooves instead of hard dirt. When she feels her horn and her tail sink into the skin of the monster she almost sighs in relief, like all the hot fire of her has finally found something to cool it.

Even the blood that splatters on her face tastes sweet when she licks it from her lips. Thana lunges to the left and circles back. Hopefully the stallion decided to do more than wait like a stone for saving. As she draws closer she lowers her horn again, wondering how deep it might be able to sink.

The beast still has more to give and she wants it. She wants everything.




"Death hath no dominion"