Her hunger only continues to grow like holly rooted in the iron blood painting a blush upon her cheekbones. Where it should be bloated and slacked there is only hollowness and the ever wanting ache of her bones. Eligos feels it too, the way his stomach trembles and roars like a trapped god begging freedom. And together they turn, with their hungry eyes, looking to the trail of poppies and thorns weaving like a golden trail through the forest.
Each step through the forest feels like a mile and each root trembling down to dust feels like a bone beneath her hooves. The darkness stretches long and low around her like horizons racing out through the night for the unknown. Moss clings to her nose when she drags her lips across a tree marked with an antler scar. This feels like hunting, following the trail of Ipomoea with hunger roiling in her soul like a riptide.
Leaves bloom fresh and new and sparking above her head before they fold down their edges like teardrops. Butterflies and moths fly above her head in lazy crown shaped circles. She can taste their wing-dust on her lips as she tastes away the last of the blood. The flavor only feeds the riptide hunger. Thana knows she should turn back and take this violence rolling far from him. She knows.
Still she walks with her hungry eyes, and Eligos's hungry snarling, with her heart endlessly telling her to turn back, turn back, turn back.
And yet when she sees him, half in the river like a thing risen from the black bottom, all her bones beg beneath the sudden singing howl of her hungry, bottomless heart. Thana listens now. She is helpless to it, because she can still see the shine of blood blooming across his skin like petals of ruby flowers reaching for the sun. It cracks open another jagged line racing down her heart in lighting bolts. It burns, and stings, and sets the hair on her spine to lifting.
Her body still moves like a weapon when she goes to him in the water. And her heart still roars like a monster in her chest as she counts the pulses of his heart like a dreamer might count the flickering poetry of a constellation. Every inch of her skin feels like a dead-thing as she presses it to his-- a bit of rot and mold creeping up a flower like broken drops of rain that have forgotten how to crave soot, and stone, and coldness.
But her heart sings like a angel's cry, as she gently presses her teeth against his spine, and it beats to the melody of mine, mine, mine.
how we climb out of our griefs
and again and again and rise
There is a trail of blood leading into the forest, marked by the blood-red poppies growing alongside it.
With each heartbeat, each ruby tear that falls from his chest, the trail grows. They stand there shivering in his wake, silk-fine petals waving goodbye and he - he does not stop to wave back.
Ipomoea does not stop for them.
He only runs.
He runs until the forest does not look so red anymore and the trees do not whisper so loudly of death. And he runs until his heart stops trembling like something left dying on the forest floor and settles into a war-drum beat that makes his lungs ache at the sound of it. Only when the roar of the river becomes louder than the roar of his own blood, and the ground turns to sponge and moss, only then does he stop. His heart thumps loudly, madly, echoing off of his ribs like it thinks he should dive headfirst into the Rapax instead of stand like something meek and patient on her bank. The longer he is quiet, the larger the cluster of poppies grows around his hooves.
What is left of the sun dips down and bathes the forest in a shadow so deep, so profound, he can’t pick the monsters apart from the trees. And all he can see is the sliver of moonlight reflected back on the whitecaps, as the river churns like it doesn’t know how to be still, or quiet, or sleep in peace. Ipomoea has never understood it better than he does tonight.
He takes one step into the river, and he begins to feel like a wild thing. He takes another step, and knows one slip, one misstep, and the forest would do nothing but watch as he drifted away. The thought does not stop him from taking another step, and another, and another until he can almost forget what he had been running from, until he stops thinking of anything at all and starts to feel it instead.
His skin still trembles where the waves push against him, and all he is is roots being pulled apart. The weight of the forest is pressing in around him, all leaves and bones and hunger. His heart answers the call of it, beats to that same living-wood song, but a half-note faster. The spaces between the two grow wider, and the more he listens the more it begins to feel like a different song entirely.
Nothing in him feels whole, not until she steps into the river behind him and presses her paper-birch skin against his.
"What are you doing here?" The words taste sharp, from all the blood he’s tasting instead of his own voice. The horror, the darkness, the flickers of magic and rage and skeleton bones reaching for his throat. He closes his eyes and again sees red, poppies and life blood and passion.
It feels as holy as it does wrong, death reaching for life, and he reaching back despite himself. It feels wrong the way his heart skips a beat and quivers as violently as his spine, and still there is a part of him that loves it.
He has stopped feeling the forest and the violence. He only feels her.
She should be afraid of the way her want turns to possession, and greed, and a need greater than the cosmos.
She should be afraid of the way her skin feels like ivory instead of rot in the places where her wounds meet his.
And she should be afraid of the way the blood on her teeth, with echoes of his blended in, tastes not like blood but like magic, and dirt, and seed.
There are a million things she should be afraid of here in the river, with the pink-hued water washing away the echoes of violence. Each drop of water leaves a stain on them, on their souls, on the jagged edges of her wounds pretending to be lines of art carved into ivory. But she cannot feel anything but the lingering echo of mine, mine, mine rolling between her bones like thunder (and the need twisting between like roots of lightning).
Thana is a storm now, a hurricane of need that started in a sea of fury, trapped in the form of a unicorn. And she is unhinged across a flat prairie when he turns his gaze to her and speaks. It breaks against the cliff-side of her teeth when he closes his eyes. She steps closer to breathe against his eyelashes, and to trace her lips down to the blood humming below his jaw. He smells like blood, but oh, oh, oh--
Ipomoea tastes like spring.
She closes her eyes as she rests her cheek against his. The storm rolls in her sinew, the river roars around their ankles, blood blooms in flower patterns below the surface of her skin, and she slips down into that darkness of all the things she should be afraid of.
And like a corpse she devours them.
“When I first saw you I wanted to make art of your form, of the way white is splashed across your skin like bones. I wanted to devour you and drain you of every drop of magic and every seed of spring.” Lightning flashes behind her eyes and thunder rolls sweet as wine across the surface of her tongue. “I wanted to kill you as much as I wanted to kill anything that dared to touch you.” Thana swallows down a storm-cloud and fills up her insides with the rain.
Language slips way from her as she lets her blood stumble in her veins and her heart stutters like a leaf in autumn. There is only their forms talking to each other like wolves, or lions, or roots tangled together by the river-shore. Her forms whispers of all the fears dissolving at the bank of her throat and of the thunder roaring in her veins like the apocalypse. She wonders if he'll understand this language of monsters, of predators, of things made instead of born.
Thana's teeth tangle in his mane when she pulls her cheek from him, and her tail drapes itself around his hocks like a chain. “I want to crawl inside you, Ipomoea.” She buries her teeth into his withers like kisses. “I do not know where else to go.” The storm breaks against his skin.
how we climb out of our griefs
and again and again and rise
If she was the storm, he was the ground that prayed for rain.
He can feel it in the way his skin comes alive beneath her touch, like he has only ever lived a half-life before her. Each press of her lips, each graze of her teeth and he can feel the lightning in her, and his blood roars like it wants nothing more than to be the thunder chasing after her. Maybe he has always been chasing after her; and maybe that is why the ache rising in him to match her’s feels so familiar.
And he knows he should fear it (storms like her’s were as likely to tear down trees like him as they were to water them). But the look she gives him in the river is another knife, crawling beneath his skin and through the muscle. Only this one, this one reaches his heart and there it sinks like the sun, pulling him down, down, down with her.
It makes him forget the violence and the dead man laying somewhere in the woods behind him, and all the skeletons lying in unmarked graves crying out for peace. Her touch makes the what if’s and the fears and the worries fluttering like torn off butterfly wings through his mind crumble into dust, and buries all the things he will never understand beneath a mountain of ash.
Because this —
This —
This is a language he has always recognized.
The curl of her tail around his hock is a language he never thought he would know but oh, he knows. This is the language the earth uses: the way a tree speaks through its leaves, its trunk, its roots; the many miles a flower travels in small, finite dances every hour of every day, never speaking, but endlessly conversing with the sun and the wind and water and all the flowers surrounding it.
And her body, her teeth against his skin, it all speaks to him in the same primordial way. It speaks in hunger and anger and sadness and joy — and the space between their bodies is a part of it. Life and death, wilting and falling, rooting and blooming. He doesn’t know who is leading who but oh, it has never mattered to him.
And in the lines she draws across his skin, Ipomoea finds all the words he’ll ever need.
He paints flowers on her shoulders, flowers that say make a home of me and grow roots in me, painted in patterns instead of words. He presses his fever-hot skin against her winter storm until he can’t tell the difference between them anymore, and that is still not enough. Not when their skin still separates them.
”Is this death then?”
He has always known what she was. And he has always loved the wildest parts of her, the parts that could make him forget he was born instead of made, that made him want to set his own fiercely-beating heart free so that it could run beside her’s.
The magic is still bleeding out of him but no longer is it growing thorns and nooses and poppies. The forest has stopped raging, and weeping, and feasting over spilt blood, and (for the moment) so has he. His magic is blooming like a flower that has never seen rain before today, and all the forest blooms with it. The trees don’t whisper to him of death, or lean away from the algae growing in the water - how could they when everything in him is leaning towards her, and commanding they do the same?
”Or is this the art you were looking for?” he presses the words into her skin with his teeth like a prayer. Even when he thinks there might be just as much winter in him as spring now, still he drags his lips down her spine and swallows more salt and dust and black-tainted water down. Something primitive rises in him at the taste.
And all the while his body is saying don’t stop, don’t ever stop and he — he is not sure if it is a command or a plea.
With each vicious tome of their language, and each line of teeth drawn down their skin, and each press of bone to sinew, Thana evaporates like a vernal pool in the middle of summer. She was wrong to think she had been made before. All her pieces, welded together with death and magic like steel and ore, seem only like coarse renderings of a weapon. And she knows, as he draws seeds into her flesh by which she might root, and bloom, and wilt, that this (this brutal, primordial tangle of more than flesh, and bone, and blood) will forge something holy from the pieces of her.
So she lets him settle against her, and the forest bow its blooms and roots around her her, like scripture. She becomes another rendering, another weapon, another monster with a gaping jaw and jagged teeth.
Her teeth say, I will, I will, I will, as she lays them against the points of his pulse over and over again until the feel of him aching against her lips becomes as familiar to her as the war-song of her heart. She molds the dialect of his form into her soul. It sinks into the black-magic like rain-water and it sits like a stone at the belly of her hunger (and she feels so full with the weight of him).
Thana's souls rises like a phoenix made of frost instead of flame, and moonstone instead of hollow bone. It flutters against the cage of her ribs and it starts to howl through the exhale of her magic against his skin. There it begs for freedom, and skies wide enough to kiss the cosmos, and clouds made of salt instead of dew. “For you it will never be death.” She exhales frost even as she wonders if he'll feel words instead of her soul sinking into his marrow like an arrow.
She answers his touch with desperation and his hunger with famine. Her spine bends below his kiss like a newborn birch. Her eyes as she turns to watch him trace the outline of her beg him to take, and devour, and swallow until there is nothing left of her but the pieces that he has forged. The edges of her become gold-leaf, and frost-leaf, and moss. Hellebore blooms down her spine, rising like spires from the seeded fire left in the wake of Ipomoea.
As much as she wants to rise up, rise up, rise up, and pluck the magic from his chest like a stone and water the earth with him, Thana wants more. Sh has no name for it, this wanting that is consuming her like dead wood. But it rises blacker than her wrath, and deeper than the sea of her hunger, and hotter than the coal embers of her aching. And maybe she understands what death feels like now, the way it settles her edges into marble and whispers of home. Her eyes blaze along the lines of him like it's the first glimpse she has ever had of the horizon.
“Please.” She begs of him, straining for that nameless ache racing through her veins like a storm. The plea does not sit strangely on her tongue, but rather it sits like a seed caught between her teeth it burrows into the loam of him.
The lilac desperation of her eyes says again, I will, I will, and then I need.
how we climb out of our griefs
and again and again and rise
The world around them feels like it is starting to spin, as the river pulls them down, down, down into the water and he wraps his neck around Thana like she is the only thing stopping him from floating away. All that he is is coming apart, all his roots and his petals and the bits of sand and blood rusted around his heart falling away like so many leaves in winter, until all that’s left is his paper-birch-thin skin. The water is choke-full of algae and lily pads now, black spots creeping around their edges and lotus flowers blooming in spite of it, like the river wants nothing more than to become a garden alongside them, no matter how twisted or rotten.
There has always been a garden growing inside of him, even when it was nothing more than seeds taking root in a desert that knew only how to grow spines and bones.
And he made his garden grow its roots through sand and stone, collected flowers and vines to plant in it, taught them how to survive in a place they did not know. He had never stopped to ask if they wanted that pain, of growing in such a hard place. He had only promised them it would be worth it, that the beauty of it, in the end, would right any wrongs he made.
Once he might have been ashamed to call this river a garden.
But now he wonders how he ever thought a rose had more value than a roseum, or that a rose ceased to be a rose once its petals began to dry.
How could he think there was only one way to grow a garden?
Her name is a sigh on his lips when he presses in closer, and closer, until his wounds touch her’s and he begins to wonder how his skin hasn’t turned the same ruby-red color. “Thana,” he whispers, because he doesn’t know how to say anything else, not when the only language he wants to know tonight is the kind they write across each other’s bodies. “Thana,” he says again with her mane tangling in his teeth, and all the things he does not know how to say (not with words, not in this language of their’s that speaks in teeth drawn down skin and blood rushing through the water) are there in his voice, in the way he runs his lips down her spine as it bends beneath his kiss.
I need you, he says in the space (is there any space left?) between them, and I am your’s.
This is what she does to him: instead of death, she makes the magic in his veins start to burn, and his heart starts to feel like a starving man, and oh, oh, oh —
It feels like love, like hunger —
and it hurts.
But her skin has stopped looking like blood and begun tasting like wine, skin he can’t get enough of, skin that is intoxicating. And even when they’re surrounded by the river he is drinking in only her, he is drowning in only her.
And when she begs of him, please, his answer is a moan that sounds as much like the music he does not know how to make.
“Yes.”
And then like a wolf (like that beast beneath his skin that is begging, and howling, and sobbing at the moon) he takes that nameless ache rushing through the both of them and he pulls her down,
It is fitting perhaps, that this bit of soot, and smoke, and decay, consumes her when there is still death and blood caught between the stars of her snarling lips. Or perhaps it is fitting that a king and his unicorn have all this black hunger tangling between their hearts where others have music. Or perhaps it only matters that there is this: art where she drags bloody water in patterns across his skin, grave-songs when the wind whistles through her horn as she traces the hollow crowns of his eyes, divinity when she growls instead of moans.
And perhaps this is the only almost-music they need, the only substance, the only blaze of heat to chase back the ghosts and the bones trailing in their wake like weeds eager for the thick loam of their hears.
Thana does not think of death, or hunger, or the iron sweet of the blood in her belly. She thinks of dissolving, of how she never knew that there was another way to dull the ache, and all the ways in which she is begging him to unmake her so that she might know how it feels to be the reaped instead of the reaper.
She does not think, oh she does not think, of the terrible things that will come from this. She does not know.
There are no promises on her lips, no holy poetry or romance. They are need and gore, death and life. They are beyond all the things that make other hearts sing and settle down to sleep. She is storm-violence to water his roots, hurricane winds to make art of his sands, frost beneath the dew-gold sun.
Every terrible black pit of her heart is his. Does anything matter beyond that?
When he drags her into the water (like a shark, like a snake, like of wolf), she only snarls that bit of music that says yes, yes, yes like a lion at the throat of a lamb. She does not thrash, not when he lays his teeth and weight against her. Thana submits as a monster does-- with teeth, and furious passion, and blood. Her submission tastes like sugar, and algae, and the fermented flowers of his skin.
And she goes down, down, down in the water fat with lotus and mold.
But her soul, oh her viscous soul, rises up in a bright-white pillar of fire.
how we climb out of our griefs
and again and again and rise
He never thought he would be the one staring into the darkness, wondering, dreaming, loving. Or that he would find something — someone — other than death staring back, reaching out, pulling him into that space that is not quite light, not quite dark, but the in-between. She pulls him into that twilight place between shadow and soul where they make their own form of poetry, and music, their own brand of love. There are no shadows there, no saplings framed in golden light, no bones to paint with moss and flowers.
There is only the two of them moving almost-violently in the water, tearing out their own hearts and giving them to each other like gifts.
If he stopped then he might have begun to wonder what this would do to them, if by giving away his heart might begin to understand what death feels like, if by taking her’s he might be remade into a wicked thing haunting the woods. But Ipomoea is burning up, his fever is showing through the tears in his skin, and each taste of her only fans the flames of need dancing in his chest. So he only traces the bone-white lightning running down her neck and across her face with his lips, watches the bright-white pillar of fire rising from her soul, and silently begs her to burn with him.
In the darkness that is left when the moon slips behind a cloud there are only flashes, like snapshots his body will remember long after. He feels her teeth drawing new patterns down his skin, and sees how the curl of her horn looks both soft and sharp with water filling the hollow gaps of it. Her voice when she snarls has his heart stopping and starting at once, his blood burning so hot he thinks it might burn through his skin. There is the press of lips to flesh and the ache of hearts filled with hunger instead of blood, and Ipomoea learns that his bones have always known the pang of hunger.
He never thought he would be the one learning how to love the darkness, how to be feral enough to consume hearts, how to wear blood on his teeth like a poem —
but in the river she teaches him all that and more.
