Thana can hear no sound from the forest but the soft knell of a lament. She can feel nothing but dirt, and rot, and blackness beneath her hooves. There are no animals to welcome her, only the soft sigh of them moving through the thicket and the shadow. Each step blooms a bruise on her heart, soft blues and blacks that are never old enough to yellow. Even still she brushes her nose against the bark and the leaves reaching heavily down towards her. And she tries not to watch the way her touch brings winter-grayness.
On and on she walks with her bruised heart. She continues until what few boundaries she recognizes in this place are forgotten. There is only the scent on the wind of magic, stone and something fever warm, leading her deeper and deeper in the forest.
Until she sees him. Then it is something more than stone and wind. Thana tracks him like soot tracks a fire, all ash and blackness to the bright heat.
She had seen him in flashes, on the island, but even then she knew he was not for monsters to hunt. He is not for unicorns that kill the jungle even as they lick the humidity of it from their lips like nectar. And yet--
Thana cannot help but follow him.
If she could cut out whatever it is the trees are saying to him she would carve deep into the bark and young wood just to hear the magic. She can see the song him and the forest are singing in soft touches. She can see the notes in the way the woods yearns and lean into every empty space left around him. He sings the forest the same way she sings to rot, hunger and want.
There is no part of her that is content (only wanting) when she walks out of the darkness when he stops. All of her strains to hear the words he whispers to the trees and to a strangely shaped bit of stone. She wonders if he is mad, or sick, or something too innocent and wonderful for her to understand. Thana does not stop until she can count continents of dirt brown (like rot crawling across a bone white stone) on the curl of his hip.
She wants to swallow the taste of him and the forest that hasn't yet died beneath the shape she makes on the moss. Thana tries, but instead words fall out from her fever quick. “Did you whisper to the tree or the stone?” The answer shouldn't matter, but it does.
Oh it does.
@Ipomoea
