The twilight does not come quietly with a whisper of humid summer breezes. The dying day does not go gently into the night with rosy pinks and dusky blues. The meadow does not seem sweetly scented with fresh blooming, night flowers.
In that between time where the world sky and time haven't yet changed over, there is a scent of fermented wine, bitter grapes and crystallized sugars. Instead of rose-golds and silver-purples there is a flash of white light that comes and goes as quickly as a shooting star and feels just as hot. All the long, tender grasses smoke and smolder in the aftermath.
There are tendrils of smoke that spiral up, up, up in patterns that once (long, long ago) might have signaled the start of war. And between all those hazy pillars of smoke there lays a unicorn with skin the color of watered down blood, almost crimson, almost mahogany, almost red enough to burn. Her horn is the only thing about her that catches the last molten and weak golden tones of the dying done. That spiral of bone almost seems alive in that between light, almost as it waivers and sways between the thick dreads of her mane like a snake that hasn't yet learned to detach it's jaw.
The unicorn starts to wake and suddenly her horn seems more like a sword than a snake when she lifts her long, curved neck from the bed of grasses. Everything about her moves strangely as she rises, her limbs like a river, her eyes like sharp talons, her tail like a storm, and her eyes like a moon. She stands as still as a deer and her teeth grind against each other like a wolf standing guard over the first kill of the winter. Her gaze flickers between afraid and enraged and her muscles tighten and loosen like a cobra waiting to spring an a bird waiting to flee.
“Thana.” She says, wondering briefly if that is her name or a world (and if she's a unicorn or a universe). The sound of her voice is nothing more than a dusky whisper, sharp as salt. She chews at the taste of her own voice, wondering why her lips taste like brine and rot and fire. She wonders too at the way she feels as if she has never really existed outside this moment under the twilight sky.
What she doesn't wonder at is the way all the grass she rose from turns black and dies.
