The wind sings through her horn because the wind has always loved the horns of unicorns. It laments in whistles the innocence that should run through Thana's blood. In shrill tones it chants of war and rage and blood, blood, blood. This wind sings of dead things, and rotten things.
Thana doesn't even notice that the scythe made of bone at the end of her tail taps out the tune like a serenade. She does not know that every inch of her body sings of death in the wind that loves her horn.
All she does know is that this girl does not smell like whatever it is that she's looking for. The girl smells like rot and bones, blood and sand. Thana thinks it lovely. Even the girl's voice is something sweeter than the way her own voice gathers between her teeth in patterns of dust. She thinks that maybe when she talks motes of decay must pour out instead of broken prayers and sweetness.
She wonders if she regretted that once, the way she only has bitterness and rust on her tongue.
“I am Thana.” The wind howls through her horn until it's easy to wonder if this world wants her in it at all. Her tail quivers when she lifts it like the tip of a lion's tail before a herd of antelope. The meadow sounds quieter (more dead) without that staccato tap, tap, tap of it against rock and root. A hoof pauses in the hair, a gesture that is in the very genes and magic that made her. It lingers there in the gloam of the twilight and black rot drips from her hoof like tears.
Each tear is blacker than night, blacker than the holes in the universe.
It lowers after a breath, that hoof that sobs rotten tears made of liquefied, dead grass. The wind settles too and soon her horn is no singing thing. It becomes a dead thing. Soon it is nothing more than a hollow spiral of bone jutting between her eyes like an accusing stare. “Are you like me?” Thana asks and her horn still holds that dead, pointed stare.
And maybe if she didn't close her eyes in a slow blink she would have seen dust rise from her lips like smoke.
@Angharad
