He reaches out to touch her. Thana doesn't know if she should let him. Her horn still wants to crown itself with his heart. Her hooves still want to sink like a prayer into his skin. The beast in her bones wants him, it wants to bathe itself in blood and fury until there is nothing in the world for her but the taste of the dusk king on her lips.
But she wants him to touch her too. There is so much wondering in her-- a sea of it, a storm of it. Thana wants to know if she can feel anything but fury and sorrow. She wonders if all the stardust on him is a constellation of hope. Thana wonders if he knows enough about the rift and unicorns to save her.
She still doesn't know if she wants to be saved. Or if she wants this fury to wash over her like wave until she's drowning in the deep black of it.
He's still coming closer in inches and breaths tainted by the sorrow between them. Thana still feels like a stone on a hill, leaning on the hill ready to fall down in a storm wind. She still feels like her horn should wear a crown. Every inch of her feels full and hollow and she wants to explode with the weight of their emotions (or maybe it's only her emotions running wild in the space between them).
The king touches her, black and twilight cool. She shivers.
Thana trembles as finely as sand in an earthquake. Her bones ache and feel like steel and stone trapped beneath skin that is too fragile to hold all their weight and sharp edges. Only her heart moves inside her. It's beating loud as a war-drum over a fresh graveyard. It hurts, that heavy beating of her heart, and she thinks that surely he must be able to hear all the songs of war singing, singing, singing this flesh of hers.
“Yes.” She says in that war song and her teeth look like dull marble in the darkness of her lips when she bites back the fury and the sorrow. Thana wants to tell him that she is looking at him like he's a corpse. But she's looking at him like salvation too, like the fire and the flood and all the things that wipe clean the darkness.
“More than anything.” She touches him back, and it's a kiss full of dull marble teeth beneath lips sweeter than death.
@Asterion
