“I didn't know,” She starts but the words snag on her teeth like a lightning bolt finding itself moving through the crooked roots of an old oak tree. The force of it sparks white where the magic still hides deep down inside the chambers of her heart. Thana's skin twitches visibly like flies have set themselves upon her, as if she is an altar on which a dead sacrifice lies.
She inhales and the dust drags down her throat like she's swallowed every dune in Novus. “I didn't know that anything could take and not harm.” The sun shifting through the thin clouds traps itself upon her horn. Shadows pool at her feet in that pattern of hollow bone and it seems, almost, to say I would take from you. I would harm you. But Thana, when she looks at the white in the corner of his dark eyes, smiles sadly as if to whisper, I would not enjoy it.
Would he even understand when she's still looking at him as if the entire night sky is hiding on his skin and telling her to taste it?
Her horn cants itself away from him when he turns and the shadow of it slithers back into her own larger darkness like a snake slithering into a hole. Thana doesn't want to be a shadow, she only wants to drown in them until she's nothing, nothing, nothing. “Show me then.” The sun feels like fire on her back. It feels like small flames are licking across her hip until salt blooms upwards like furls of froth made into a mockery of petals. Fire is running wild across her skin but she's still full of winter, frost, and rot. She swallows and the desert air hurts.
Thana sidesteps closer, until she can feel the feathers of his wings whispering across the tight planes of her ribs. Each silken feather feels cool, not cold, like a spring blooming up from the dunes. This close she can taste the darkness in the air around him, like smoke and leather (as if the air around him could make her full where grass never has). Part of her wants to ask him if the air around her tastes like bone left out in a mighty storm, rain-washed and laced with char.
She leans into the feathers and the cool kiss of all that blackness.
“I want to know what it feels like to be cold.” Thana's not brave enough to tell him that she wants to feel what it that death feels. She wants to know how the forest feels as she walks through the trees and dappled sunlight.
But part of her wonders if she'll start to kill his shadows the moment they touch her skin.
How does the darkness die? Can it?
@Caine
