Thana
In the gloaming darkness she counts each pillar of smoke rising up and dissolving into the black space. An itch rises her in, creeping along her spine like it's a branch of dry, dead wood. Every inch of her skin feels like that blackness, a thing to swallow smoke, and soot, and wishes. Every inch of her feels like dead wood. Thana is brittle and looking for a fire.

She wonders what would be left in the coal and embers of her. She thinks it would be nothing but ash waiting for a breeze.

The horses drinking and dancing seem strange, un-tethered where they should be cautious. Her eyes follow them like wolf follows the track of mice through the thicket. At first she doesn't want to move closer. At first she only feels the way all the dead winter branches sigh and learn towards her in the night. The horses dancing around the fire seem to alive for the likes of her. But then she hears them talk of wishes and her hooves cannot help but to move slow and oddly through the snow.

Thana wishes. She wishes for a hundred things-- a hundred feelings other than 'cold', a fire other than 'consuming'. The red unicorn wants a skin that is not red as blood and heavy with weaponry.

She wishes, wishes, wishes. And when a horse presses paper and ink into the fragile hold her of magic she cannot help the way her young heart trembles and aches in her chest. I wish, she writes. Each word drips wet down the paper, as if the paper itself refuses to hold the wishes of a monster. Thana pauses when a cluster of stars shines, as if fallen, in the corner of her gaze.

The ink is still running wet, like blood, on the paper even as she forgets it.

“Asterion.” She whispers and it doesn't sound like anything other than a name dipped in smoke when the syllables of it fall from her lips. Upon her brown her horn trembles. That too whispers in the smoke and it sings songs of war.

Thana reaches for him as he reaches for her. The forgotten paper falls from her magic into the fire. I wish, burns and burns until only embers and soot are left of it.

But perhaps, if she was not caught wishing on fallen stars instead, Thana would have written in dripping ink, I wish I did not want to kill him.



"Death hath no dominion"

Thana
Thana looks at him drenched in firelight instead of saltwater, dusted in stars instead of war, and she understands. She could count all the way in which he is a king and she a unicorn with destruction a low, organ hum in her blood. Touching him feels like dying, like he's pulling every black thought through her skin and he's heedless of the fact that there will be nothing left.

If he traced that patch of lightning all she would have thought about was that other unicorn marked with a storm. If she scrapped her blade across his brow (like everything black thing in her is telling her to do) she would have wondered if he was thinking about her at all. Thana thinks he only sees the pieces and gives it a name so that it can be called another other than lost.

She wishes she didn't drop that scrap of paper dripping ink like blood. She wishes she dropped into into the fire and watched it burn down to nothing but black dust and char.

Asterion pulls away and she follows suit because she's still thinking dark, black things. “If there were any traditions I didn't bother to learn them.” Her voice grates against her own ears and she lashes them back to be lost in the wind-blown tangles of her mane. She doesn't tell him that all she knows of where she came from is, is, is....

Nothing.

The skin across her back feels like a fly is crawling down the dip of her spine. Thana shivers and it's not from the cold or the fire.

She shivers because she wants to drag both her lips and her blade across this king dusted in the night sky. The fire doesn't feel warm anymore and she wonders if she could kill flames like she kills flowers. Or would she kill it like she dreams of killing girls with feathers or boys with stars in their eyes?

Blood blooms like a flower across his skin and Thana thinks only of the heart in which it sings through. Her lips quiver with a smile, although she couldn't name the reason why it feels so terrible against her teeth. It feels like a lie. “Did you burn a wish?” Her voice waivers like a hawk in a hurricane, sharp and dying. Thana feels as unsteady as a seed in the stone.

She's still thinking about burning, and blood, and how everything blooms in her like a graveyard each time she looks at him.


"Death hath no dominion"

Thana
It could say, yes, if she poured it all out into the snow until all she became is a storm turned to snowflakes. But she's a unicorn, and her flesh is a cage, and her blood is singing for violence while her heart is singing for love.

She does not understand what it means to learn with him. Already she understands the way the stars paint constellations on his skin, and she could follow the map of his blood in her dreams. Are those not traditions? They are hers, she knows no others, needs no others. But, oh, oh how she wants them!

So she says nothing about all the things she want's to do 'together' with him.

Thana steps closer to the fire and calls it home. Each flame feels hot against her skin and the snow at her hooves is melting. It leaves blooms of death around her. Grass turns to seed then, seed gone bad and turned to mold. The distance she puts between them yawns like a great-toothed thing walking up from hibernation. Her heart yawns with it and each bone making up the cage of her ribs feels like a tooth curling inward underneath her belly. She wonders if he can see the way she's falling apart and falling away from him.

“The ocean is dark.” Thana does not think it is so dark in his heart or his head. He is made of stars, and twilight, and mortal things that she knows how to unmake. Of course he is made of magic too, but she was made to understand the way horses are made of magic (and the way in which it makes them all monsters).

Yet when she looks at him and the firelight dances in his eyes like small suns, she's not thinking of unmaking or magic. There are still a hundred small wishes, and a hundred dead things, flourishing in all the places of her Asterion will never see. She looks to the stars briefly, and then back to the brighter ones shining in firelight across his sides.

Thana does not look away again.

“Wouldn't it be better to throw them to the moonlight?” If his eyes shine like two caught suns, her own shine like purple oceans in which the sea is all wrong, wrong, wrong.


"Death hath no dominion"

Thana
“The moonlight lasts long enough.” She looks away from him, away from the fire, away from the sea roaring like a lion against its cage of rocks and sand. The moonlight snags in her eyes, shards of diamond dust that she wants to read like a map. All her blood craves that silver-light; she wants to drink it like she drank the light-water. She would drown herself in the moonlight if she could, she would drown and wish on the bit of stone it comes from that she could learn to love the sea and the stars instead of loving the way they beg to be unmade.

It's drowning she's thinking of when she moves to him, drowning and stardust maps made of dying stars. And it's dying she's thinking of when she traces a constellation down his neck. Thoughts are running, running, running wild across the backs of her eyes. Thoughts are burning when she paints a kiss of a comet across his shoulder.

She pauses. She inhales. She breathes him in.

“Do you think the ocean could keep everything it drowns then?” Her words taste the brine on his skin. Winter makes her breath curl up from her lips and across his spine like smoke instead of words. Every inch of her trembles like a storm, like a star trembling in the black, black night. It's not dying she's thinking of now, at least she doesn't think it is.

Thana pulls away until her horn and her circle of death are the parts of her nearest to him. “Could the ocean keep me?” She asks even as she wonders if it's all those bleeding, watered down wishes that the monster in her is really looking for.

And perhaps for the first time it's not his death that she sees when she snags her eyes on his.


"Death hath no dominion"

Thana

When she holds their eyes together it's as if he's more than a star. She's wondering if Asterion could light her way home, a silver shine through the thick black river of death she walks in. Thana almost steps closer then to catch the breath of smoke falling from his lips like a weapon. But, when she inhales and tastes only ash and not brine, she tell herself that he would only lead her to madness.

Although her blood sings to her that moon-madness would not be so terrible.

The space she grows between them starts to call itself a monster when she steps back, back, back towards that black treeline no firelight or moonlight can touch. Thana wants to loose herself in the dark, and forgot all about the way the words, “I would not want to be returned,” feel in her heart when she cleaves the last bit of wonder between them into two pieces.

There is only Asterion standing by the fire and Thana far from him with something hot like fury in her belly.

But it doesn't singe her like fury should. It rises in flames of cold-fire and still it does not start to ache like she expects it to. It makes her hungrier than she has ever been and still it does not hurt in a way that makes her want to peel back the map of his stardust to whatever place it is that she's looking for.

So Thana turns and runs. She runs until her belly starts to ache and her bones start to feel once more like steel beneath her skin. Even then she does not stop, because the world still does not make sense in the same way the ache does.


"Death hath no dominion"