Each kneeing cry rattles through the chasm of her body and dances off her bones like song. The death magic in her rises to meet it, rot to violence, hunger to instinct. She doesn't know why she wants to drink of this monster, why she wants to devour each shred of magic that makes it so grotesque. But she does, oh she does. She wants to gut it and carve warnings into his scale with teeth and horn.
It strikes and she's bracing and ready. Her horn is lowered and the wind is still crying a war-trumpet through the hard hollows of it. Thana is almost eager watching that gaping jaw start to lower, but it passes right by her and hits the stallion who collided with her.
She's furious.
Her own sharp trill challenges its keening cry, a trumpet of fury that came from another unicorn. It feels like a lion of war-song living in her lungs, it burns and burns even as she screams it out. Even as she screams she watches him dance out of the way. Unicorns, She thinks, because she's not really one is she? Thana knows she is nothing more than a beast with death in her bones and a horn upon her brow. There is no innocence in her, not really, how can there be?
This war is what she's made for, to kill monsters and devour their horror. To drain magic from bodies like a leech draining blood. There is magic in her genetics that made monsters worse than this: bears with stone eyes, beasts that devoured memories like air, pillars of amber in which monsters waited with wide eyes.
What is a sand-beast to her, but dead?
So she watches it prepare to strike. She watches the way the stallion's gaze looks at her and pleads, save me. Everything slows down as if the death magic in her blood is slowing her own heart. Beat by beat she watches him and she watches the beast, and she is waiting. She's coiled like a snake too, and she's just as hungry as one.
It lunges, wide-jawed and furious. Thana lunges to meet it. She's smiling beneath its shadow, a fierce-white smile full of hate and need. It arcs above her, aiming for the stallion standing like a stone waiting for death. She had hoped it would choose the easier kill, she's not disappointed. Laughter boils like hot water at the back of her teeth. Everything in her is still screaming, freedom, freedom, freedom.
Thana runs at the belly of the beast with her horn and her tail raised. The sharp tips of each glint in the sunlight and the sand like small stars. Sand is still blowing against her like small needles and her vision is blurry with it. Each blink only makes it hurt more but even the pain still makes her think of freedom.
She remembers then that she's angry (she's forgotten why). Thana leaps as high as she can with sand at her hooves instead of hard dirt. When she feels her horn and her tail sink into the skin of the monster she almost sighs in relief, like all the hot fire of her has finally found something to cool it.
Even the blood that splatters on her face tastes sweet when she licks it from her lips. Thana lunges to the left and circles back. Hopefully the stallion decided to do more than wait like a stone for saving. As she draws closer she lowers her horn again, wondering how deep it might be able to sink.
The beast still has more to give and she wants it. She wants everything.
@Jahin
