The longer she stares at him the more the blackness starts to blot out the red. It blurs together in her gaze, like a void. It ripples like water, currents of dark on dark. Thana thinks of home, of light and nothingness. She thinks about how the sea looks under a moon-less night, darkness and sea-foam that shines with dim starlight.
But what she thinks about the most, as she watches his shadows, is death.
So she walks closer to him with words rattling against her tight lips. Lightning is running down her spine and it's urging her in licks of electricity to move closer and closer. She wants to see what's under all that black rippling like water in the desert. Would it parch her thirst if she drank of it? Would it kill her? Would it taste like violence or like winter?
Thana moves closer and closer until the shadows of the canyon are singing through her hollow horn with the wind. It sounds somehow sweeter, that wind-song and shadow-song, like a tune she dreamed of once (if monsters dream at all they surely dream of moonless skies and black seas). She can almost see something again in that darkness, something that might be the thing she's looking for.
Just as she's about to reach out, and learn what shadows taste like, the blackness vanishes with a whispering language that means nothing to her. She almost cries out, almost begs all that darkness to stay just a little longer. Without the song of it the words seems almost dead, like she has killed it all just by daring to think of dreaming. Thana looks at him and feels-- feels something she has no name for. The shadows were easier to look at, they did not look back at her and speak.
“Never.” She says and the word has on it the flavor of ozone and gunpowder, like having that single word between them is a match against the darkness. Thana wonders what would explode if she dropped it. There is also one part of her that wonder why she's saying anything at all to the man below the blackness (or if what's she's saying makes sense to anyone but her). It's the darkness he wants not him; she wants a darkness to dream in.
When she walks closer her tail whispers against the stone and dirt, like that glint of a blade is whispering a secret against his skin. She wants to tilt her head towards him and tap her horn against it. She wants to laugh because someone has finally looked at her and seen the monster they should see. It feels like the answer to a prayer she didn't know she was chanting into the void.
She reaches out, wanting to touch the blackness. Thana wants to drown in it, let it devour her until there is not rot around her, only night. “What does the darkness feel like?” The ozone in her voice, waivers and thins, like the stars waiver below the glowing sun. For a moment she realizes how strange she must seem, following his darkness like a hound following a trail of blood.
Her next thought is that she doesn't care. She only wants to know if the darkness feels like that coil of winter laying her heart, scaled and glittering like a pale, poisonous snake.
@Caine
