“The moonlight lasts long enough.” She looks away from him, away from the fire, away from the sea roaring like a lion against its cage of rocks and sand. The moonlight snags in her eyes, shards of diamond dust that she wants to read like a map. All her blood craves that silver-light; she wants to drink it like she drank the light-water. She would drown herself in the moonlight if she could, she would drown and wish on the bit of stone it comes from that she could learn to love the sea and the stars instead of loving the way they beg to be unmade.
It's drowning she's thinking of when she moves to him, drowning and stardust maps made of dying stars. And it's dying she's thinking of when she traces a constellation down his neck. Thoughts are running, running, running wild across the backs of her eyes. Thoughts are burning when she paints a kiss of a comet across his shoulder.
She pauses. She inhales. She breathes him in.
“Do you think the ocean could keep everything it drowns then?” Her words taste the brine on his skin. Winter makes her breath curl up from her lips and across his spine like smoke instead of words. Every inch of her trembles like a storm, like a star trembling in the black, black night. It's not dying she's thinking of now, at least she doesn't think it is.
Thana pulls away until her horn and her circle of death are the parts of her nearest to him. “Could the ocean keep me?” She asks even as she wonders if it's all those bleeding, watered down wishes that the monster in her is really looking for.
And perhaps for the first time it's not his death that she sees when she snags her eyes on his.
@Asterion
