Thana is not running through morning frost where the flowers sway weak stemmed and kissed gently by young winter. Her lungs are not heavy with exertion and there is nothing frothing sea-white and briny at her shoulders. Each step she makes is as steady as the last, like a stone rolling across flat-lands. Rolling, rolling onward with only the wind pushing it further towards some distant point it's eager to reach.
Thana is not running, but--
Death is running free in each hole where her hooves have sunk through the grass into the mud. Rot is dancing across the frost. Flowers bend as if snow has landed upon them each time her shadow makes a shape on the rolling hills. Time runs in patterns behind her, broken patterns that twirl around and around like broken spindles of a wheel. The frost melts and freezes, rocks turn to dust, flowers bloom and die.
Above the sun is blooming over the night (not unlike the way she kills everything lovely). The silver light is fading and with it the way she can hide all the gauntness of her. The red morning sun is harsh and it makes her look like fresh blood rolling slowly over the dew and frost. Shadows pool like sea against the shoreline in the creases where her skin folds over bone. There is nothing beautiful about the beast of a unicorn walking through the dawn, nothing but solitude and some sense of 'other' that hangs around her like a noose.
Ahead she spots the mare, although it's that mantle of sweat and brine that makes her lift up her purple eyes and look. First she sees the horns, twin pillars of bones glinting in the light. Thana though sees not horns but a crown of bone blades, swords plucked free from evolution. She wonders why the magic gave her only one hollowed out crown that sings in the wind.
Do this mare's horns sing too? Could she tell her what the words are to that rush of blood and light-water song? Something besides death and rot blooms in her heart, something wild and fierce that reminds her of running. She wants to know what this mare knows of horns.
Thana moves closer once the mare stops. She cannot help the way her hooves are almost soundless. She moves like a shadow made of blood (like a body dragged through the grass in a mockery of life). There is in every inch of her a suggestion of something wild begging to be let loose. It's almost terrifying the way she walks, like a unicorn made instead of born.
She doesn't smile, but her lips quiver like a shield around her teeth as if she wants too. A hundred different words clang against her tongue. Each word stings more than the last until there is nothing but a thorn bush of words caught in the shield of her lips. At her back her blade taps, taps, taps against the grass like a heartbeat.
Tap, Tap, Tap.
“Why did you stop running?” She asks and each word matches the heartbeat tap of her bladed tail. Or is the beat of a storm gathering in the distance? Thana doesn't know that she sounds like a suggestion of violence that hasn't chosen which wind it wants to fly on.
She still likes to think she sounds like a unicorn.
@Boudika
