FAITH IN THEIR HANDS SHALL SNAP IN TWO,
AND THE UNICORN EVILS RUN THEM THROUGH;
SPLIT ALL ENDS UP THEY SHAN’T CRACK;
AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION.

The air is dense and deep and dark as the bottom of forest when she wanders up the thirsty mountain. A storm is dying in the distance, thunder and hail trickling off into a cold wind. Shadows stretch out around them, the unicorn and her monster made of violence and sand, and each wraps around the bent willow trees and the towering evergreens. Rocks cry out as them tumble down the steep sides of the trail. Each cry is warning (muted when the twilight fog rolls in) that the valleys are as thirsty, and hungry, and hollow as the mountain pathways. 

And perhaps if there was religion in her blood instead of death she would have sunk her horn deep into the marrow of the mountain and pleaded for safety. Perhaps she would cut lines into her sides and called the blood prayer and sacrifice. 

Perhaps there is a world where she is not a blood-red unicorn with rot instead of blood. 

Thana is too full of black-magic and wanting, and she is as thirsty as the mountain. She only wonders why the mortals of her court whisper of the ghosts and gods lingering in the mountain path. Tonight, in the twilight fog and the dying echoes of roaring thunder, there is only Thana and Eligos and their silent steps that promise war instead of scripture. 

Together they come to the meadow carved out of the mountain peak, with the grass that is not grass at all but steel, and gemstone, and magic left behind from gods and mortals. Together they move into the hallways of marble, and the pillars of amethyst like wolves coming to the tall-grass of the elk. Their steps do not echo or rumble with the thunder. They whisper, and coo, and carry their shadows like chains and spears dragged across the hollowed stone. 

They hum as darkness hums and bleat as dying lambs do. 

They wander the hallways and pause to drag their noses through the dust of broken statues and altars. They etch lines in the decay with horn, and claw, and fang. Ivy withers around their necks when it falls from the forgotten archways and violets left in a vase tilt blackening heads towards them (as if they are the sun instead of the moon-black). Marble trembles and falls like stars around them as it quickens in its mortar like a century has passed with the humming war-song of her heart. The echoes sound like thunder. 

Like they are calling the storm back, and home, and here, here, here. 

Like they are storm-clouds instead of flesh and bone. 

And their eyes flash like lighting in the twilight fog when they turn towards the steady echo of another soul in the dying church in the mountain. Together they smile, and nicker (as much as wolves can exhale in welcome instead of wrath), and step towards the mare who looks as elegant in the shadows as they look feral and wanting.

FAITH IN THEIR HANDS SHALL SNAP IN TWO,
AND THE UNICORN EVILS RUN THEM THROUGH;
SPLIT ALL ENDS UP THEY SHAN’T CRACK;
AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION.

Perhaps in the great, black and gaping jaw of the night with a crown of storm clouds between it there is a certain romanticism in the meeting of two wolves. Perhaps it is only in the certain way their bodies curl both in the space between them and away from it. Or perhaps it is nothing more than the way the dust and the flame tease each other in the blackness, each a spot of not-quite color in the nothingness.

And maybe they are two wolves meeting between the teeth of the gods.

But if the mare with her whisper of a voice is a wolf she is only sinew, and stalking start of a hunt, and a howling chorus at the moon.

Thana is the kill, the blood, the crack of ribs breaking and shattering like porcelain.  There lives in the curling song of her horn the poetic tale of the ruin of the herd. In her eyes there is not the color of lilac but the color of blood coagulated and begging for rain beneath the moonlight. She smiles and her teeth are flat, strong as a stone, and prepared to devour and desiccate despite the way the shape of them begs for blade, and fern, and fruit.  

They step closer. Lichen blooms across the marble tiles, each darker and more rotten than the last bloom. The air, the wind, the smell of cloying black candle, becomes weighted with the acrid sweetness of mold, and rot, and time on a corpse. A prayer collar left as a sacrifice on an altar turns to dust when her shadow falls across it. Candles crumble, flower weep and bend towards her like sentries and guards. Her smile does not fade, or falter, or waiver when she dips her nose in a greeting that lowers her horn to the mare's brow.

There, her horn seems to say, I would unmake you there..

“There are no gods here.” She says. The soul of her magic is still fat with slumber, and bloated with the old kills. There are are no gods here to wake it and hollow out the belly of it for more, and more, and more. Until there is nothing left. More. “There is only you, and I, and him.” A growl in her belly sounds like a laugh, a howl, a bray at the moonlight begging to be worn down into a sickle in the other mare's eyes.

Again she steps closer. The blank candle flame flickers against the shadows of her face and fills them with something more profane than red-light. Eligos pulls back his lips and nips at the satin lapping at their feet like a nest of snakes. His teeth sound like an explosion in the black jaw of the night. And after that, when the crack of bone on bone fades into the humming of their hearts and the lulling coo of their lugs--

After that it is not the unicorn who loves a king that speaks.

“If you are clever you will pray to none of the three.” Another bit of marble falls beside her like a dead star holding tightly to a wish. Her belly snarls. “Are you?”

It is not that unicorn at all.

FAITH IN THEIR HANDS SHALL SNAP IN TWO,
AND THE UNICORN EVILS RUN THEM THROUGH;
SPLIT ALL ENDS UP THEY SHAN’T CRACK;
AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION.

Death does not turn away, paint in kisses of salvation and lust, or do anything but consume with its hollow, wanting that is never full. The blackness is eternal, unending, inescapable. It creeps. It is sudden. It gnaws like a cancer and spreads like a vine born from her king's magic.

And Thana, looking at the mare with her secrets tucked away like cells begging to be cut out, becomes not a unicorn, or a red-monster in the black night, or a master of the desert-beast at her side.

Thana becomes death as much as she consumes it with each brass drum inhale and exhale of her rotten lungs.

Even the air, the frankincense, the flowers, and the dust bloated with useless  religion, do not survive the touch of her black-magic blood. The parts of her, those small sparrow frail parts, that know how to love start to wither in the death-want and the death-knell whisper of mortal flesh when it's pressed to her horn.

She does not wonder if the mare realizes, as clever things never do, that there is nothing to touch upon her flesh that does not maim, and desiccate, and destroy. She lets her begin the unmaking, smiling as a wolf will with teeth and froth and hunger, when the mare presses her cheek to her spiral horn.  The iron and copper smell of blood sits just below the smoke and prayer smell as the drops start to puddle on the floor like tears from an innocent thing. “It has always been the dying things that flatter the most.” Thana steps closer as the mare pulls back and drags her horn through the wound like a bow to a violin. It's a gesture that promises an answer to every secret-thing-not-said in the mare's words. It promises song, and almost sacrifice, and the only religion that the earth knows to pray too.

It promises that even gods, even holy relics, even already dead things discover a new unmaking with just a kiss (only one kiss, only one gentle touch of  horn or lip) from her. Thana knows that the moment the mare touched her she had marked herself for the unmaking. And like a god, like the things the mare has promised to fuck, Thana listens.

She lowers her horn to answer the prayer given in touch and flattery. It points at that mortal heart now, that fragile little thing that hasn't learned yet the quick, frantic beat it should be singing. Clever things never learn. Not until it's too late, too late, too late (and the mare did not say she was clever).

“You bend to the wrong gods, mare. They cannot give your son back to you.” Her voice is more than another trembling strand of night between them or another bone deep purr of Eligos as he licks his lips. Her voice is everything. Thana hides no secrets. She only gives them away like the clouds peeling back to reveal the stars (look there, in the belly of her jaw, constellations).

Thana steps closer and taps out holy writ with her horn against the mare's shoulder. Tap. tap. tap, like a knock, tap. Their shadows tangle together, like vines and veins, in the moonlight creeping in through the marble arches. She exhales against the mare's skin and with it there is language and scripture. “It does not matter where you have seen me. Not when I can give your son back to you.”

She replaces her horn with teeth.

“I will not even ask you to bend.” And in the darkness, with her monster pressing close, the true-gods and the true-death, ask for no sacrifice. They only offer.

And then...

Then they will take.

FAITH IN THEIR HANDS SHALL SNAP IN TWO,
AND THE UNICORN EVILS RUN THEM THROUGH;
SPLIT ALL ENDS UP THEY SHAN’T CRACK;
AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION.

Magic, that terrible beast of death, rises from fever to wildfire. It makes teeth out of her veins, organs out of her sinew, sentient thought out of the pits where her lilac eyes watch the mare. The horn on her brown turns to throat  and the blade at the tip of her tail to stomach. Black magic and rot reach out through Thana's jaw of constellations and drag lines with a unicorn's teeth across the mortal's shoulder. They draw the arcane patterns of anointments lost in the tombs of sacrificial lambs.

Thana's heart and soul are bloated enough that there is not a thing in this world, this coil, that would have the depth to consume her. She is ripe with all the things in this made form of hers-- ripe for the rend and the ruin

Beneath her skin all her joints are steel and sword (all the things that do not bend, do not submit, do nothing that is not destroy). She leans her weight into the mare, her teeth turned to stones laid down one after the other on fresh grave-dirt. “They are false gods and idols, mortal, if it's your soul that makes them bend.” And when she pulls her teeth away, leaving her words behind to hang like wounds on that pale and bloody skin, it is the only gift she plans on giving the wayward mare with her silken scarf and her fragile lust.

The darkness continues to bloom around them, between them, and in the places were the air leaks into their blood cells. Candles melt without heat. Skulls lament in the silence as their jaws and their horns turn to dust in the wind  whipping through the unholy hallways.  Between them all Eligos starts to purr a beckoning and the dust rises up into shapes that gallop like wolves around Thana and her kill. Their paws make no sound but a sigh.

It's the same sighing sound her horn makes (that cosmic whisper of yes, yes, yes) as she lowers it to point at that cavern crease in the mare's chest. Already she can hear the hum of her doe heart and the bleat of her embers that will never learn how to be truly wild. Thana whispers as the darkness does and sighs as the dust monsters and weapons do. “I have already told you how.” Distance grows thin and worn between them as Thana and her monsters press in like a tide to a willow too close to shore.

“You only need to say yes.” And when her tail blade whines against the stone like a harp even that sounds like an echo of yes.

Thana does not want the soul. She never has.

She was made to want only the heart.

FAITH IN THEIR HANDS SHALL SNAP IN TWO,
AND THE UNICORN EVILS RUN THEM THROUGH;
SPLIT ALL ENDS UP THEY SHAN’T CRACK;
AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION.

Heaven, and salvation, and religion have no place in this gloaming darkness and dead candlelight. There is only room in the chapel of dead gods for the monsters, and the master, and the howling of their hunger as it echoes like thunder in their chest. It's all hunger and darkness, thunder and snarl, iron and copper and blood dripping down between them like wishes in a well. The ground turns fat and hallowed with the blood of lost Euryale and the ghost of her son (and maybe there is the bitter tang of her lust in the air too).

Thana smiles as the mare impales herself on a kiss of horn as if Thana has promised life instead of death. Her magic roils and purrs in her stomach, eager to swallow down another mortal like the desert soaks up tears and rain. There has ever been nothing in the wake of Thana (only rot, and blackness, and silence) and yet Euryale, like all the rest see words in the darkness and relgion in the quiet that exists in no place other their their mortal, fragile, hope.

The blade on her tail whines against the stone. Again and again and again-- a whine, a moan of thunder, hunger, and hunger, and hunger.

Everything black magic and wanting lives in the howl of her blade as she lifts it towards the mortal mare. Thana leans into the kiss against her cheek as if she's eager for the touch of flesh and heat against the winter of her skin (and it's a lie, it's a lie for anyone but Ipomoea). She purrs a come closer that sounds like wasps caught between tongue and teeth. Dust monsters nip at the space around them, their teeth scraping against both unicorn hock and horse hock. Their snarls rise in a chrous of yips and barks until the silence is wild with sound above that drip, drip, drip of blood and rot. Marble continues to fall to the ground around them like more and more stars.

A universe is falling around them in the idols of false gods.

“Hush mortal. I do not need to hear you beg.” The magic-made unicorn says to the mare bloated with wanting, need, and lust. Her eyes turn dark in the shadows as she pulls her cheek from the mare's lips. Eligos pushes between them dragging his teeth along Thana's skin in a warning and a begging prayer that only Thana knows the sound of.

Thana almost turns to leave. She's still riding the black magic racing through her in wave after wave. Her bones tremble with a hundred insincts that Ipomoea's unicorn pretends not to understand. But the king is not here. The gods are not here. There is only Thana and a mortal, magic and false prayer. There are only monsters around them snarling for the want of hunger.

And then there is the whine of her blade as a warning.

She drags it across the mare's throat (pulling back at the last moment as something like guilt and want run down her spine like lightning) It's not enough to kill, not with the way it waivered at the killing strike like a petal in a storm. But it is enough to make her teeth ache at the scent of blood and life and need on the air. She snarls with the violence of her magic as it presses against the backs of her eyes like a tumor. And she does not want to discover how hard the magic can push before she turns to leave.

“Make it down the mountain if you want to live as a thing claimed by death. And if you want only the gift of your son stay here until the dawn. Either way you are still mine.” She says. But the way she turns to look over her shoulder, before she dissolves into the darkness with her pack of monsters,  seems more of an appology than a promise.

And maybe it's the closest Thana will ever come to saying, I am sorry.