Thana wants to say she understands, but she can only look at Corrdelia pointing at her head and think of bears with gemstone eyes, and harpies with hollow bone bellies. All she can think of are a hundred different monsters with eyes that do not connect a soul but devour it. And when she leans away it's there in her gaze, that knowing look that suggests it's not an eye looking out from her head but a hungry, hollow spiral of bone.
She does not want to know what monster would crawl out from her if she opened it up.
The blade on her tail starts tapping again and her bones start their screaming to run, run, run. When she blinks it's to wash away the image of a burning tree and bright petals rotted into the loam. The echo of the image burns in the black, like lightning that is still coming down from the sky. She does not think the lighting will ever stop striking patterns of char across her mind. Thana doesn't even know what she would be without all those hunting, searching, wanting rivers of electricity.
“Change.” She offers and it sounds like an echo of goodbye, of all the things railing and slamming around inside this cage of flesh. Thana wants to say she hopes it's something more terrible than her coming, that the world might offer her something other than endless wanting. Instead all that comes out is, “I hope you weather it well.”, and it's not a lie even though she thought it might have come out as one.
Her hooves are already carrying her away from the tangle of colors taunting her on the table. She doesn't say what it is she was painting. Because she was painting death, and dirt, and bugs that eat the corpses. Thana was painting her self over a sea of sunshine petals and hope. So she runs away from it, from the walls and the mead and a civilization she will never understand.
Thana runs like a wild thing with a black smear of rot wiping clean each mark her hooves (and her blade) leave in the soft carpets.
@Corrdelia
