The island had been as cruel to Thana as she to it.
For every mile of it she consumed there had been an inch taken from her flesh. But her pain had been nothing in the face of the hunger of a made thing, of a magic thing, of a thing made to devour every pound of broken magic in the world. And so she had eaten of the island, and drank of the star-blood river, and tasted of the innards of a monster-god.
Her belly is still full of it and her magic still bloated with the ichor of a king’s stomach. There is salt-water in her veins, so much that it stings as it pools in all the wounds running map-line and rune-like across her skin. A burn pulls against her shoulder, smoldering even after a week of cold embers. Lines from sharp lapis stone run in grids across her ribcage. Even her eyes, normally so full of furious lilac, are as pale and faded as the first twilight hour.
But Thana, as she walks through the castle, feels like something has settled in her for the first time. There is no ache but that of exhaustion. Her belly does not snarl in hunger. Her horn does not sing like a whip-o-will in a storm. Thunder does not live between her teeth and her heart is only a steady lub-dub in her chest instead of a snarling, haunting timbre.
Every ounce of her magic, her furious beast of magic that lives between her heart and soul, is nothing more than a quiet stone in her chest. There is no inferno that makes her feel like she must roar, and roar, and roar loud enough to shake down the stars just so that she might get a moment of silence.
Thana is--
Just Thana. Just Thana in a way that she has never been before.
Thana who loves Ipomoea. Thana who is regent in a city full of gardens. Thana who has two daughters who must only live with a sliver of the hunger that makes up every cell of her body. Thana who is walking into her room, into their room, across a threshold as golden with mossy growth as it is black with decay.
It is better, she thinks, in the quiet.
Then, it is better to be empty than to kill another one of his flowers.
And when she curls up in their bed of silk, and tucks her horn to her bloody knees, there is not a single thread in the drapes that fades and all the bright flowers stay bright as her eyelids flutter closed. Had she been able to think anything in the silence of her dead hunger it would have been this is better, over and over again like a poem of love she had never understood.
he flowers are the first to tell him that she has come back.
He is in the garden with them when she does, wandering the rows of flowers and trying (and failing) not to turn east. The soil at his hooves rises gently like a wave, as roots slip through its loam and flowers unfurl themselves upon the peak of it. Around him he can feel the earth sighing — he can feel it welcoming him, pressing itself to his skin with a peace he should feel echoing in his bones.
But he is not sure he does.
There is something other in it, in the way the soil shifts like a restless thing, like a secret it is struggling to keep from him. There is something of a warning in the way the leaves of the rose bushes begin to curl like the soil they are rooted in is seeded with disease. There is a warning racing through his garden that he cannot place in words, but in a feeling that runs somewhere beneath his soul. Every time he tries to place it, to pull it out like a weed, it slips away.
Still, he searches for it. He searches between the rows, beneath the roots, in the secret places their leaves shelter, in the center of every perfect flower that unfurls at his touch. And the longer he looks, the longer he cannot find it —
the more convinced he becomes that it is not the soil, or the water, or the sunlight, or any speck of disease pressing in on the stems.
It is him.
And the whisper of the earth, when it comes to him, crashes against his ribs like an earthquake opening ravines in his heart. She is here, it says in dust that spatters against his side like rust, like blood that has dried. She is here. And he knows what they mean to say is, she is hurt. He knows it in the way the dust on his lips tastes like blood (like her blood, her violence, her love.)
The flowers are forgotten behind him when he follows the trail that races ahead of him like lions. He follows the sound of old death, of dead gods, of the lack-of-magic that makes his heart feel like a dying thing caught on the cusp of winter. His heart breaks a little more because of it.
He does not stop to see the way the threads of the drapes are still bright, and new, and hanging around her like doves. Or to look at the flowers and the vines that have not yet begun to wilt even when death sleeps so near to them. He does not pause to think of how quiet it is, or that something is both wrong and right in their room.
Ipomoea sees only her (it is always her) curled in the middle of their bed of silks that are freshly stained with blood. His sand-and-soil heart starts to roar, and snarl, and tremble in his chest with something that is as black and dangerous as it is soft. And his teeth feel like broken things when he presses them to the blood of her side and whispers, “Thana,” as if speaking to her soul instead of the heart just on the other side of her ribs.
His magic wants to snarl and tear the sand from all of the mortar of the bricks holding this castle together. But instead he begs it to bloom in layers of moss upon the windowsill, and to grow wildflowers, and herbs, and poppies overtop it. The bee balm unfurls the brightest, begging to become a salve.
Thana discovers, as her soul flutters awake at the sound of his voice, that she doesn’t know who Thana is. Her bones do not sit as they should in her skin without magic making her marrow feel like marble. The sound of her heart is different without the hunger and need. In her chest she does not hear a roar but a whimper, a bleat of a thing comforted in the black boughs of a midnight forest. There is no lighting dancing in jagged cracks across her eyes.
All that is left, as her soul transforms from wasp to butterfly, is that everlasting, ever-lingering, lament of sorrow. Sorrow, and seeking, and all the small fractures only Ipomoea might be able to keep together.
But even though she does not know who Thana is, she finds that she is desperate to discover it in the fiery garden of his touch. If there is a surrender here (her first) she is eager to give it when flowers start to bloom around the gore of her body. When she lifts her head to the echo of her spine cracking like a whip it is in a headlong rush towards the promise his magic, his love, his shadow of wrath, had whispered to her soul.
One butterfly becomes a swarm of them and each wing hums against the last until she is full not with the beauty of them but with the plague of them.
“Ipomoea.” She whispers so softly that the only sounds in her mouth are those of the butterfly swarm. And for a moment her heart and soul stumble over the look of him haloed by the brightness of their room that she did not fade. Had she been another unicorn, born perhaps instead of made, she would have swallowed down the butterflies so there was only the bittersweet of apology on her tongue.
But even a lost Thana, a wondering Thana, still holds only death in all the syllables of her name. And so gives him no apology, no sound of sorrow instead of butterfly swarms, no vocalized bleat of a thing comforted in the dark and bare boughs of a midnight forest. All she gives him is a kiss of skin to skin instead of teeth to skin, and hunger to bloom, and need to love.
Perhaps she only had to empty herself like a puddle in the desert so she could learn the sweetness of love instead of the ferocity of it. Perhaps she only had to turn inside out and witness death instead of becoming it.
Perhaps, she thinks (and she knows it is a lie when she blinks), I will only bear witness from this moment forward.
Her kiss does not leave his skin, she thinks it never will, when she leans her weary weight against him. “The island should not be here.” And when she finally gives him all the weight of her, all the hunger that is already rising again like a tide in her skin, she wonders if he is the only thing, the only thing, she had been spit out into this world to find.
