When he tilts his head back Thana follows the curl of his throat laid bare. She tries to trace the path his eyes are taking and her own eyes ache to watch him. It feels like roots are growing out of her, tugging and tugging and begging her to become dirt, and bone, and rot beneath the moss. The dirt sighs under her hooves when she steps closer still, close enough that her horn runs through that bolt of golden-light.
Oh what she wouldn't give to be warm with something soft and gold, something not molten like wanting, and hunger, and endlessness. Sometimes she wonders if it's not blood running through her veins but winter just brave enough to brush the edge of spring. Would flowers even grow in the spring of her, or would it be only bones blooming through the dirt like stems?
“What do the trees whisper?” Her voice is as dry as a dead leaf and as wanting of water and food. And when she turns her horn to follow that bolt of golden summer it points at the sapling, and the promise of life, like the frayed end of a noose swinging in the breeze (swinging, swinging, swinging). If there is joy to be felt, or hope, or something kind, she does not feel it. All the dappled gold only makes her feel sorrowful and monstrous.
His eyes feel like judgment when he swings them back to her, almost like he knows something of horns that point like frayed ropes. It feels like each tree, each flower, each hawk in the canopy, has turned their black eyes towards her. Thana blinks and tries to bury the violence that rises in her with a look like his, she tries to feel like nothing more than a unicorn in the forest with a crown on thorns. Her teeth ache, her heart aches, every bit of her aches. “No one does.” She bites her cheek until blood blooms metallic on her tongue. The sting of iron settles her.
She inhales and it's golden. “I'm Thana.” She answers with a sigh of her bladed tail against the moss and dirt (like it wants to be roots instead of death). There is enough golden on her tongue to keep her bruises from saying I am magic and death too.
And she does not ask who he is.
@Ipomoea
