The water feels both cool and hot as it coos and frets at her skin. Her horn feels like a kiss of wind between her eyes when the water starts to carry that weight of that sword made of bone. Here in the deep, with light flashing strange memories underneath her closed eyes, she feels like something more.
Thana feels like magic, like a star sinking through the ocean like a stone, flaking off bits of wishes as it drowns.
This water cools her fury in brightness and she lingers below the surface like a lamb lingers in dewy, sinking sunlight. Her lungs start to burn and ache. Her tail lashes at dead weeds until blooms of decay rise up around her like the air bubbling out from her lungs. Still she does not leave the water, not until her body convulses with a warning that death has spotted her and is coming.
And so she rises, knowing instinctively that she is not done searching and so she cannot let the light wash away all the jagged pieces of her.
The ground slopes upward as she walks back up the slick, black shore. The stones still crumble to dust when she walks across them. Thana only notices the stallion, the way his edges blur where they suggest the night-sky instead of form. Before the lion of purpose starts to take her she wonders if he too is made of broken pieces glued back into something that resembles life.
Thana wonders if there is anyone in the world like her. If anyone else looks at him and feels a beast of hunger dragging claws across their bones as if they are nothing more than the bars of rusty cage. She wonders if, when she draws closer, anything but fury will pour from her teeth when she opens her mouth.
The space still yawns out between them when she stops. Parts of her are afraid to get too close, other parts whisper to her how easily her horn might sink though flesh and stardust. She doesn't know where either of those parts comes from. “I know you.” There is rust on her voice, rust and a low ozone purr.
She doesn't know if her soul sings of him because she's seen him once before, or if it sings because the magic wants her to close the distance between them. She doesn't move, only stands there watching him with tears of light falling from her horn like drops of blood falling from a mortal wound.
@Asterion
