That single restless hoof, although it makes hardly a sound in the snow damp dirt, rings in her like a single siren, lighthouse call. All her bones ache with the sound of it. Her blood slows to the speed of clay running through her veins until it grows hard in her organs. The cavern of her ribs echoes with that sound as if there now waits between them a wolf baying at the moon.
“There are ships here.” Thana wonders if she's supposed to smile sadly and say that she understands what it's like to look at the yawning, hungry sea and know that it wants to eat. But all she knows is that she has seen ships from the cliffs. They looked like small ants crawling across a mirror too afraid to look down at their own bellies. She doesn't know how it feels to try and tame the sea and call it bravery, or purpose, or adventure.
There is enough of all those things rattling at the marrow in her bones to last her a lifetime. She's dead enough without the weight of the dark deep dragging all her dreams down into the blackness.
“But do you really want to go back where you came from?” Thana shivers at the thought. A memory flashes across her mind. Everything is too white and too bright and she blinks because she's afraid that all that endlessness is shining through her eyes (like a mirror on which ants crawl). She's afraid that there are monsters lingering across her gaze, and fronds glittering rusty underneath a storm of winter lightning.
Thana blinks and her eyes feel dry beneath her aching eyelids.
She knows then, staring at the mare coated in sweat and brine, that she would rather die than go back to the white plague that made her. There is no sea she wants to tame but her own dream sea full of gemstone eyed bears and trees that bloom rubies.
When the other mare starts to pace the space between them feels almost thinner and unweighted. Thana does not move to follow. She only watches each step she takes like a lion watches a running antelope. Her tail twitches like a snake and when she lifts it the hair parts around the blade like a crown made of life. The skin across her hips quivers like a jaguar quivering in the leaves of a jungle storm. The need to run burns through the clay in her veins and turns it to acid. She swallows it down.
Death blooms out around her to wither every hardy blade of grass that has not bowed before the blade of winter. “I come from magic.” This Thana says because it feels less sharp than saying, I come from everything broken. The words are duller than the way she wants to say, I am made from broken things. Giving a half truth to Boudika, who cocks her head like a hawk, feels like taking a life she never wanted to destroy.
But, Thana is a monster (no matter how she wants to be anything but) and monsters are made to destroy.
“Will you show me your city?” The beast swimming through all the acid of her asks. Her lips mold like hot clay before the will of it and her eyelids still ache, as do each of her bones.
@Boudika
