This Thana understands-- the tilt of a head as predatory as a hawk, the way air moves through the nose in a beat as steady as the rotation of the moon. Each movement the mare makes speaks a language that comes easier to her than anything else in this strange place. She can understand all the signs that say I could kill you, and the sound each makes rings like a hallelujah in her chest.
There is a language in the way sweat is covering the mare in a fine frost (like mist on blood-red flower) that she wants to answer back in. Thana wants to drag her horn through that sweat and sea-foam. She wants to write words into her skin, words of war, of running, and words of purpose. The words, I understand you, are banging at her teeth like a shovel banging at a coffin.
Her hooves move closer because predators never just stare at each other over the throat of a kill. The frost glitters like a wealth on her blade when it curls around her legs. And where it rests a thin string of blood blooms just above her hoof, like a necklace of rubies that promises song if she were only to move just a little quicker or a little more elegantly. Thana wants to brush her nose against that sweat hiding in the hollows of the mare's brow and learn what secrets all that fury and froth holds. But she stops and only lifts her nose up like a small greeting between them (as if they are not two bears meeting in a field).
It says something, in a predatory way, that she tosses her horn towards the morning sun and not between them like a blade. The bloody sky shines in the slick, black curls of her horn. Thana could be painted by an artist instead of a beast in the moment, but she doesn't know it at all.
Thana thinks that the world always will paint her as a monster because it should, it should, it should.
Her eyes are hot on the mare, small suns of amethyst that do not waiver or turn to introspection. She doesn't want to look towards all the violent things running in her thoughts.“Is there anywhere you can't go when you run?” There is curiosity in her voice, a hint at all the not violent thoughts and wants running through her like wildfire. Thana does not understand that there are places that a mare who tilts her head like a hawk cannot go.
But she wants to understand. More than anything she wants to understand.
“You wouldn't.” She says because the finer parts of conversation are lost to her. The unicorn made for death understands the language of their horns and the hunger in their hearts better than words. But she tries when she moves her nose a little closer to the mare covered in sweat who moves like a wolf thinking it's a bird. “I've never been to your court before.” What she wants to say is – no one knows me, they only have memories of others that look like pieces of me. The thought is there though, in her gaze where the purple flashes black as the night sky.
In a blink the blackness is gone. She smiles but it looks like nothing more than a twist of her lips. She looks like another wolf who wants to be anything but a hunter. “I am Thana.” This time she doesn't tell the mare that her name means death, and magic, and war.
This time she doesn't think she has to.
@Boudika
