It is not the call of the bay stallion that brings her to the meeting (she does not know to call him King). Nor does the whispered word war that flows through the breeze like sand in a current bring her. Although that word does spark something in her chest. Like an ember too close to a dying flame that thing catches and burns and consumes all the places in her bones that are full of rot.
Thana burns like a forest fire and she's almost surprised to look down at her hooves and see death instead of flames in the half-moons she's left in the loam.
At first when she sees the gathering of horses she's not sure what drumbeat in her heart made her hooves sing their way across the grasses to this place. At first she feels like a lion watching them although she couldn't place where the feeling came from. Everything about them seems strange, colorful and bright.
Thana does not think dust pools, like saliva, behind the teeth of the horses gathered. She does not think they are made of the water that runs through her dreams like moonlight running through the dark. The only thought really flowing through her head is that beat, beat, beat of the war-drum and the hunger in her heart.
She can still feel the crackle of that ember made flame in the way she awakens like a corpse might awaken in a grave.
Her eyes blink and it feels like she's looking at them through a shroud of dirt and gloam and glitz. They blink (and blink and blink) and then they catch on the bay stallion with twilight branded into his skin. That ember in her chest blazes anew. It's hot, hot, hot and she's almost surprised that the ocean wind isn't singing an eulogy through her horn now.
The dust behind her teeth tastes like soot when she licks at it like a wildcat at a deer. Thana knows now what she came for, what beat it was that hummed and burned through her bones.
One among this group of horses, she thinks, has drank of that water running like moonlight in her dreams.
(she's useless and has nothing to add because she knows nothing) D:
