Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
There is a kaleidoscope of colors in the spaces between the nebulae, and the comets swooping like fire-birds, and the planets rolling above them like a hundred rocks caught in the gravity magic. A first it's an echo of color in the darkness, a sting like pressing her eyes closed too hard, a ghost of a dream colored only for that first moment between slumber and life. And then it's more, a sound that is red, and lilac, and sadness.
Thana's eyes burn to see it all caught between the tail of a comet and the pale bone-white lines etching out a constellation between the spinning stars. They burn, and sting, and well up with tears of black decay instead of water. Her tail taps on the glass-earth and even that sounds red, and lilac and sad. Perhaps that's the sound of violence: red sadness and the crack, crack, crack of glass echoes that makes her heart tremble and remember the breaking of bones.
Her walk turns to a run, and then a gallop, and then something like madness streaking through the kaleidoscope of not-really-there color. Beneath her skin the membranes of her lungs tremble and snap like butterflies only just emerging from a cocoon slumber. They taste where they should not; they taste stardust and moon-dust and cosmic-dust that is devoid of nothing. It only makes them inhale faster, and exhale faster than that. And even when it seems that she has been running forever, and the echo of her madness has long since become the heartbeat of this place, she still cannot find the fog.
Even the endless of it, the feeling that she'll run until her lungs wither and die, does nothing to slow Thana's flight across the glass-earth. Her blood is singing too fiercely for her to think of anything but faster, faster, faster. Like molten red, molten sound, it's singing, faster.
But when a nebula explodes into life before her, Thana doesn't remember the moment when the madness smothered out and the wonder grew roots. She doesn't remember the moments between running, and stillness, and the tremble of her lungs.
All she can see is the colors and that steals every thought, every bit of rage, from her furious heart.
When Asterion comes home, he does not realize it at first.
It feels like just another flicker of the Rift, a sea-change that washes away everything before. He still doesn’t know how he feels about that world, though now his heart is anchored to it; there was the sickness, true, and then emptiness, and the feeling that nothing was solid and nothing would stay. But his family, they were there and real and permanent, and no part of him could ever hate or fear the magic there.
But he had always planned to come back. Too much of his heart was in Novus.
Yet this is not the world he knows, and at first he wonders if Florentine had sent him through the wrong portal. He is surprised to find that he is breathing, that there is something solid beneath his feet (though it is smooth, and cold, and his hooves echo strangely on top of it). At first he doesn’t try to walk at all, only stands and looks up and drinks in all the stars and comets and worlds that dance (and sing?) far overhead, the stars on his coat a pale imitation of their majesty, a ghost of a ghost. Asterion is alone beneath the nebulae; there is no seagull in his mind, no landmark, no scent of anything but the dust of ancient stars and the cold black emptiness. With nothing else to do, he begins to walk.
After a time (though there is no time), he hears the world shudder with thunder. It sounds like stars sparking against one another, like meteors colliding in a violent dance, like a booming echo - until he recognizes it for hoofbeats, racing across the glass-earth. From how far away do they echo? Asterion can see nothing but color and light, a slow-dreaming show of a universe’s birth, but he knows now he is not alone.
So he tracks that sound, and only stops, frozen in wonder, when a nebula birth light and form before him. He can feel tears stinging at his eyes, now, summoned by nothing more than awe; and then, with a little drawn breath, he sees a figure race through that cloud of star-stuff, trailing dust and light in her wake. And he finds that he knows that figure.
And he calls into the trembling, echoing stillness (that is not at all empty but full, full, full of everything),
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
Thana did not know, oh she did not know, how dull parts of her had gone.
It all comes back as a rush, a bloody headlong rush, as she hears his voice long before she plucks it out of the tangle of stardust and young constellations. The searching, the hunger, the need, it all floods though her system when she turns to him. In it Thana is drowning and there is no part of her that wants to look for air, or peace, or all the soft-fire moments she has found with Ipomoea.
She's going underwater, under-violence, under-need. And she's walking towards him still. This time there is star-blood dripping from her horn and black decay leaking from her eyes. Instead of fire-birds there are constellations spreading their nebula wings and circling around their heads like broken apart moons. There is not the same longing in her gaze, the same wish turned to ash, there is not the sea roaring in their ears (there is only their heartbeats, the song of their blood).
Ten stars start to fall between them as she moves towards them. Each is nothing more than a bit of dead stone, a boulder crashing against the glass and making it groan. All the glory, all the awe, all the kaleidoscope of colors grow cold around her as her magic feasts, and feasts, and feasts. A star cracks, the sound not nearly as loud as the racing roar of her heart, her magic, and all the bits of her that have come rushing back.
Thana goes underwater, under-violence, down to the black bottom of it.
His skin feels the same as her hunger remembers it, all stardust and ocean-water. There is no forest in his flesh, no pollen, no golden leaves turning to golden dust. There is only the sea and the bones she might count beneath that. Thana inhales him, presses her lips hard into his neck.“Asterion.” She whispers against him and when she presses hard enough that he might feel the teeth behind her tight lips it's a whisper of a warning too.
Still, even now, Thana wants to unmake him.
“You left.” And the way she says it as she pulls away from him, makes the words seem like a strange mix between lament, sharpened blade, and warning. The star-blood drips down her horn and the groaning glass turns to cracking glass as more and more dead stars start to fall.
Thana starts to wonder what world will be beneath this one when she starts to fall with all the dead stars.
He doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath until she turns toward him, and the amethyst of her eyes flashes like a comet burning up. Then it rushes out of him, all unsteady, and he is glad she isn’t close enough to hear it. Asterion hadn’t thought before calling to her, and now he starts to think too much - what if what if what if - and remember all the times she looked ready to run him through. If she did now, who could blame her? She might even believe she was dreaming. Which of them could truly say that this world was The world?
But Asterion is not a frightened, inexperienced boy any longer, too uncertain to act. He pushes those thoughts away with the same kind of power it took to bend a wave to the shape of a wish, and he walks to meet her, too.
Above them is a cradle of stars and light and Asterion spares a thought to wonder what will happen to them - if they are real, if they exist. Even time in the Rift could not tear such questions from him, there where the only law was magic and the magic was sick, and both beauty and horror were born of chaos in equal measure.
It is silent but for their breathing and the sound of their hooves, the light waving slow overhead, until the stars begin to fall. The bay flinches when the first strikes the glass, but he continues to walk, and the stars on his coat shine in dim reflection of those above. He does not flinch again, even when he sees the black streaming from her eyes and her horn, the way the golden god-water had from her body when they met.
They meet again beneath that eternal midnight, the endless making of the dawn. Asterion closes his eyes and only knows truly that this is real at the whisper of pain within her greeting. Her skin is hot below his mouth when he touches it to her shoulder as softly as moonlight.
When she speaks it, that truth and accusation, he keeps his eyes closed for a moment longer as she pulls away and cold rushes in to fill the space she left. In that utter darkness he steadies himself before looking at her, the dark of his eyes reflecting the light of falling, dying stars.
“I came back,” he says, and does not break his regard of her even when the ground groans and begins to splinter below them and the stars plummet faster. He begins to wonder if it is Thana making them fall, and if she realizes it, and if she will stop before everything is unmade. “How long-?”
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
It is the smell on his skin, that bitter tang of rotten magic, that feeds deadwood into the flame of her wrath. Her lips vibrate already with the memory of his skin and her teeth ache to pull every trace of it from his skin. The trembling of her skin when he lays his lips to her shoulder has nothing to do with sorrow, misery or missing. Magic is running molten white as a new blade through her body and it's bellowing as it runs through her veins, and soul, and heart.
The will to stay away from him, to keep her teeth from the elegant curl of his throat takes all the power in her form. Another stall falls. The glass moans, and cracks, and quivers as violently as her spine.
And still it is not enough. It's not nearly enough.
Somewhere in the black space Eligos senses the closeness of a feast. He starts to run with drops of stardust pulling up at his feel like the roots of almost-grown children. He howls.
The moonlight on her face tastes like mourning, and grief, and dust, when she scrapes her tongue along her teeth. There is not the misery there should be when she speaks. “You should not have.” Everything in her voice is thunder, and electricity, and the moan of the wilting, weeping stars. Another star falls.
A moon turns dark as stone; whatever life once lived around it has burned out.
Across the moaning glass she watches him with that tremble still running down her spine and that roar still chanting through her breast. She blinks, slow as a slumbering and dreaming beast. Her thoughts strain towards golden saplings, frosted and black. The imagine flickers in and out of sight like a firefly on a sharp-grass field. It's faint enough to blow away in the fluttering rush of her beating heart.
Thana cannot catch it. Not now. Not with all her dullness wiped clean like rust from a sword.
Her horn lowers towards him. She cannot help it. The taste of the silver mourning light still hangs on her tongue like a teardrop on a dragonfly wing. It pools and turns thick as blood. “Almost a year.” She wonders if he can hear the hungry drumbeat of her magic. Or is it only the moaning glass at their feet that makes this too small space between them sound like war?
Does it even matter when Eligos emerges from the oil-thick darkness between two stars?
Does it even matter when her magic is starting to speak?
He should know now what it is that’s driving her down to madness and violence, with the blade on her tail and the crooked bolt of lightning carved across the red of her skin. He should know, having come from the Rift, having felt the pull of its magic and watched the chaos of it form world after world and monster after miracle, its fever ever changing. Gabriel would know, at once, the thing that plagues Thana and whispers for her to hunt.
But for all he’s been through Asterion still views those worlds as two separate things. That here is Novus and there, unreachable, is the wilds of a country shredded by magic. As though Florentine was the only one who could open that door. Oh, he should know better.
If nothing else he should recognize that this world, the stars crashing down, the void reaching out, the smooth cold glass of the floor - it is not a place Novus should ever have birthed.
Only when he hears the howl echo across the ground like scattered stones and echo across the emptiness like a dreadful secret does Asterion look away, lifting his head toward the source of it. He can’t yet see what comes, only the sparks of light thrown up by its feet. His heart trembles, and tenses like a fist. Had he thought it was beautiful, this amphitheater to creation?
You should not have.
“Why?” It is soft, softer than a moon going dark or a star falling, but it is a challenge nonetheless. Has he ever challenged her before? It lives in his eyes, too, when he turns back to look at her, and she lowers her horn, another sliver of darkness in a black world. The stars on his coat are the only ones not wavering.
But it is not Thana’s horn that pierces his heart surely as any ever has ever found its target and bit deep. A year. Asterion almost gasps in this airless space; for the first time he feels like withering. His magic, no further away than a beckon of fingers, recedes like the tide as her own moans, hungry.
He lowers his head then, a weakness, even as a creature that belongs more in the Rift-world than Novus emerges from the black. A year. The knowledge devours him, more unspeakable than her magic. He thinks of Marisol - of Moira - of Isra and Eik - of everyone left behind. His worry grows teeth. The stallion blinks into the darkness and his eyes reflect dim stars.
For a moment, he envisions offering himself at the tip of her horn. For a moment, he almost says Do it, Thana, do what I can see you threatening every time you look at me. Instead he only sighs, as long and faraway as an arcing comet, and squares his shoulders and meets her violet, violent eyes.
“And what is this place?” he says at last. “It feels like…like the other world. Like some part of it is bleeding through…”
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
His blood is calling her home. She can hear the notes of it, echoing beneath the falling stars like drum. Her magic hears it too and it starts to drag sharp teeth along the edges of her ribs. It whispers poetry to that song, poetry and wolf-howls.
Like a tuning fork her horn angles towards it.
She steps closer with the fury running strings though her joints. It feels like they are on this perilous cliff, each looking out at the sea and tossing two different wishes into the white froth. Thana looks beyond him to the sloping lines of the stars and wishes that there would be something other than hunger drawn out in those tangled lines of light.
It had seemed like home, waiting beneath the summer halo of the forest with Ipomoea waiting for the sun to set. It had seemed like her hunger had found a new home.
But she was wrong, so wrong. It drives her closer, closer, closer to him.
And then he looks down. It is the thing that saves him, the head drop of a thing lost to sorrow instead of life. “It was easier when you were gone.” She says the words to his empty brow, each note twisted with echoes of his blood-song. There are too many teeth in the words and in the bitterness hanging on her lips like fermented wine. Part of her wants to touch him again, to lower her horn to his cheek and angle him back up to the dim moons (and part of her knows she would not be able to stop herself from dinging deeper, and deeper, and deeper into his cheek).
She would not stop until she met sinew, and bone, and teeth, and blood.
“It feels like home.” She answers. There is no image to the word for her, only the feeling of rot, and death, and chaos reaching through the world like mist. Home is wild, and dangerous, and full of hungry things like her that look at boys like home is between their bones. Home is full of their teeth on throats and their bellies full of marrow and stone.
Eligos turn his gaze onto the stallion. It lands with the sort of weight that only comes with the intimate knowledge of all the things beneath it. There is a fire in the golden glare of it, and wrath when the monster bares his teeth. Thana pulls away as Eligos steps forward.
And maybe that's all it takes, the sight of a monster made for a belly full of flesh instead of magic stepping forward to the kill she does not want to make (not really, not where she's a girl instead of a thing made). Her tail slices a warning down Eligos's hip.
Come away. She flashes an imagine of her dragging his body into the dirt with teeth, and fury, and not an ounce of fear.
The monster steps back. Thana tries not to notice the squaring of Asterion's shoulder, the boldness of his gaze as it finds he again, and the way his stars look brighter than all the others around them. She tries not sing back the song his blood is singing to her.
“Do not find me again Asterion.”. Because she wonders what Ipomoea would think she she found him with the blood of a once king on her lips. She wonders how long this world will survive if she lets lose the magic in Asterion's blood.
Thana does not think it would be long.
The ground still moans as she walks away with stars falling all around her form like balls of arcane and ancient fire. Eligos follows with blood blooming on the wound of her warning. Neither of them look back.
He wonders why it is that he’s never looked at the tip of a unicorn’s horn and seen danger. He knows firsthand that it is a killing thing, a sword for justice, a weapon as much as a wonder. Yet even watching the dip and tremble of hers his body does not warn him, his heart does not speed like the heart of a hare under the shadow of a hawk, his eyes do not find hers to beg and spare himself from violence. Maybe he is a fool, not to believe she’d do it; just a hopeful, helpless fool.
Asterion wishes he would touch her. Maybe then anything, everything would feel real.
But she does not. She inches closer, like a hunting cat, and she says it was easier, and the only thing between them is their breath like empty nebulae. Her words fall like the stars do and land with a shatter between them and his lips ask why, why, why but his voice never follows; it stays empty as space.
Not until she says this place, this living dying universe, feels like home does cold warning cup his heart. But there is too much happening for the meaning to ripple out like a pebble in a pond and pass the warning to his mind; that will come later. For now the ridge along his back only prickles when he feels her companion’s gaze fall on him like hyena’s. There is so little he can see in the darkness - only a glint of golden horns, only a flash of pearlescent teeth, only a pervading sense of threat and hunger. Asterion lifts his head, shifts his weight, remembers what it is to play war -
And there is something almost worse in watching Thana caution her beast against him. Even that is nothing to what she says next; there is that familiar feeling of falling, then, the sudden drop, the running heart. There is the smell of blood in the air, sharp and vital, but all he can think of is his own heart cleaved, all he can hear is the echo of the unicorn saying the same words his twin had said, years and worlds ago, a promise and a threat he has carried with him through and through and through.
Asterion bites his lip and nods. There is no time here but eternity, and eternity is how it feels to watch her turn with her beast and walk away.
“Find me,” he whispers, long after she is too far to hear him. Asterion watches until Thana and her monster are swallowed up by darkness, and he watches as the stars continue to fall and crash and dissipate like embers on the black glass ground.
Before the end, before all becomes darkness, he at last begins to walk toward home.
