Eligos thou shalt feast; In the time before time, in the held-breath silence before anything was made and named, there was only darkness. And when that darkness at last broke and shattered, scattered to bits by the piercing light, the pieces of it still recognized each other. So it was when Thana’s shadow fell shivering over the ground that belonged to the beast. The Nerubyian was curled up like an ouroboros, slumbering as the dawn wind sloughed sand from the tops of the dunes and sang the stars to sleep. The desert was still blue and cold, and beneath his jaw and scaled belly where it lay upon the ground the beast could feel the infinitesimal scrabble of the feet of the beetles that climbed the dunes to drink the morning fog. For them his breathing did not so much as shift. For the sand wyrm that passed far away and far beneath like an orbiting comet his paws flexed and curled in his sleep. For the teyr that blotted out the waning moon in its passing one ear twitched, and still he slept on. But when the unicorn crossed from her forest and the first palm-width succulent died in her wake his golden eyes blinked slowly open. When he stood his fur and scales wept grains of sand in whispers. It was the only sound in the dying night except the wind and the footsteps drawing ever nearer over the blue dunes. Like a wolf the Nerubyian dropped his head low and breathed slow and hot as he listened, but his teeth were not a wolf’s teeth and his hunger was not a wolf’s hunger. And when he slipped into the shadows between hills with all the ease of a shark gliding into a channel to see what made his desert die with thoughts of war and hate there was nothing wolf-like about him. For even the proudest of predators is only an animal - and the Nerbuyian is no animal but a monster. @Thana |
Interactive Quest - the things that monsters know;
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Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Day by day, she is unraveling. Each day there are more bloody leaves standing proudly in the corner of her gaze. There are bones, and blood, and torn off fur, drawing new maps for her each time she goes to the forest. To her the day, the noon, the fiery sun, has become a thing for cursing, for raging against the dying of the darkness. But it's night by night---- Oh it's night by night that Thana is becoming. The moon touches her hotly now, not silver but molten ore and stone dripping across her horn like water. There is only darkness waving a welcome in the corner of her eye, and shadows reaching out like fat branches heavy with leaves to run along her ribs. By night she does not rage but loosen. And she does not hunt. Thana consumes. The sand is almost water beneath her hooves, the dust of it nothing more than morning dew lining her skin with stardust. If there is a trail she is following, or a body she is tracking like something more than unicorn, there is no hint of it that mortal eyes might unveil. And perhaps the trail lives only in the line of her teeth, clenched together and bared like bones, that flash in the molten moonlight. However it lives, it doesn't end but continue on through the dunes, moonlight, and the blackness pressing in on each like oil. And however it lives she does not take her teeth from its throat even as the sand stretches endless as the ocean before her. Thana does not relent. Even when the monster unfolds itself from the darkness and her moonlight. Even when the monster flashes it's own tooth-bone trail at her. Even when the hunger rises from her skin, like a wave washing clean the stardust sand. Even then she does not relent. The tip of her horn catches the moonlight like a noose when she tears out of the darkness between the hills. And somewhere far below them, a beast burrows deeper in its tunnels. Because tonight... Tonight is not for the animals.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Perhaps she should wonder at the way her blood does not pause to think before it roars. Or maybe she should worry that her bones know this pattern, of violence and fury and war, with hardly a thought between the marrow and the brain. And there is no one moment in which Thana decides to maim, there is only the doing. It takes less than a meeting of their gaze or a bellowing of their blood. It takes less than a star falling dead into the dunes for the war to wage. There is nothing in her that believes in fate, or prophecy. There is only purpose, only rage that still has no direction in which to sing. Her blood recognizes the monster. Hello, it says. Shall we see which of us is monster and which is corpse,it sings like a graveyard bell. It tolls and bellows between the moon and the plume of sand rising up around the two of them like a cage. Thana does not want out. She wants through, by blood and gore she wants through. By the time the creature is leaping for her (and she almost pauses to wonder at the way he cuts through the darkness like a sickle moon) Thana is already rearing up to meet him. Like a lash her tail swings forward, the blade whistling through the sand-cage, aiming for his side. Her horn feels like an aching, raging thing upon her brow, the only crown a unicorn with wrath and death instead of innocence needs. And that horn sighs when she swings her savage mouth full of dull teeth to rip at the monster as it drags claws down her side. She can feel the sting of the wound, and the blood running down her side like tears of magic, when she swings to meet the creature before it can lunge again. The pain only makes her smile and her own violence rise to a fever pitch below the blood-red surface of her skin. Thana snarls at the beast, all tooth and blade and hunger. When she lunges for the beast, and this time she is the first to move, there is only the need of a dying thing for a meal driving her onward. Her hooves want bone and fur instead of sand Until the end then. Her blood says. Even wounded Thana still wants through, not out. Only through.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Had she not been so lost to the fury, the one that made her holding its teeth around her soul and biting down, Thana would have laughed to see him summon the sand to help him. But she's too lost to the violence of her blood, and the hunger of her magic, and the thing in her that keeps screaming, unmake, unmake, unmake. It's all she can hear when the monster lunges again. And so she surrenders to it. Thana lets the violence, magic, and the primordial rage take her. There is little thought spared for the sand-beasts leaping for her spine and throat. Always, all the lingering traces of the decay that made her are whispering, always go for the throat of the source. To her that's all the golden blood monster is, a thing with a throat made for tearing asunder. Each sand beast that lays claws to her sides, dragging lines of blood across her rib-cage like roots dragging across a forest floor, will find their claws turning to broken down dust and rot when they meet Thana's blood. Even as the beasts try to devour her-- she devours them. The pain is sharp, stinging, but all she can see is the first creature still leaping for her blood. All she can see is his snarling teeth, and his sharp claws. All she can see are bits of him begging to be plucked loose and sent back to the magic that made such a thing as he. All she can see is death. And so she lunges to meet him and wraps her teeth around his neck like a wolf instead of a horse. She drags him to the ground even as his creatures set themselves across her spine and hang themselves from her horn. Thana only knows that is if she is dying then he is dying with her (her blood knows the reason but she only knows the hunger of it). Even when his claws make purchase across her skin, she does not let her grip loosen-- not even when her knees fall to the ground and her tail swings forward to carve a line down his side. She doesn't think she'll ever let go. Thana's lungs flutter, tired and full of dust. And the feeling of it, of the exhaustion, only makes her clench her teeth tighter together and start to pull. There is still through death to go.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Her magic, her furious blood, slips past hunger and turns feral as a storm caught between her skin. She can feel it, the violence, the rage, and the-- and the-- She can feel the sand dissolving into dust and smoke. She can feel the golden ichor pulsing down her throat and sliding into the marrow of her organs like a disease. The monster's heartbeat flutters towards death and her own stutters once in her chest and starts to flutter in an echo. Together they become not two dying things thrashing violently on the sand. Together they become one thing, one monster, one shape of violence smelted into bone and flesh. She trembles. The monster trembles. The desert wind rushes in and brings with it the dawn. Thana, who has never known that word, mercy, takes her teeth from the throat of the monster. And the monster who has never begged for anything pulls his claws out from the unicorn's side. Together they do not rise, but tilt bloody eyes towards the the dawn, and the golden desert sand reaching out endlessly towards that horizon like a sea of nothing. Together they close their eyes as the dawn turns to shades of blue and gold. Blood soaks into the sand around him and becomes nothing more than another oasis of violence in the red desert. And if they find death, go through death, they will do that together too. |
