There is, in the way he touches his shoulder to the tree, an entire world Thana knows she will never reach. When the leaves fall to the ground like dying stars she can only see the way they are going to die and evolve into dirt. Perhaps there is beauty there, or growth, in the cycle of it or the way the tree shivered against him until bits of it fell like tears. But it's all part of that world, that secret, of which she will never be a part of.
It hurts even though she knows it should not.
She wants to walk towards him until they're pressed against the same tree. Or until she can feel the same things that make him sway and close his eyes like he's drowning. She wants to drown with him in the roots connecting like rivers racing for the sea. The golden sunlight is a weight on her back when she moves towards that sapling wavering in the breeze. Thana hopes it is young enough to know nothing of wild unicorns who walked here with death in their eyes.
Although she knows, the moment her shadow falls over it like kolosos, that it will learn (it will wither but it will learn).
“It's not meaningless to me.” She wants to move away from the sapling to him. Thana wants to whisper in his ear, like a secret gateway to her world of death, and rot, and wildness, that it should be meaningless. Perhaps he would tell her them how cold she felt-- like winter. Or how hot her eyes looked-- like amethyst comets crashing down like dragons. Maybe he would smile at her and say, not to us.
But Thana is made for monsters and saplings bowing in the wind like wheat. Not for mighty sentinels that know (she is sure they know) she is nothing good come to the dappled sunlight of their sanctuary.
The wind rushes in and the humid curls of her hair move with it. They tangle around the purple stone laying at the base of her horn, hiding the one lovely piece of her from this stallion and his trees. And when she tosses her head, like wolf just waking up, sharp needles of feeling make her quiver as the knots pull and snag.
She tells herself that's why she's trembling like a leaf-- the pain and nothing else.
He is an easy thing to look at, she thinks, when she swings her gaze away from the sapling back to him. Her horn points at him like judgment. “Ipomoea” His name is a sigh in the wind, tattered and torn like a leaf long reaching for the ground. It is something dark on her lips, a prayer to something feral and wild fluttering in her chest. “Can you save it from death?” Thana inhales until she can feel rot pooling in her lungs like fermented fruit--
She lowers her nose to touch the sapling wavering in the golden sunlight.
And even though her touch is as gentle as a fawn she knows that rot and ice will soon turn all those perfect leaves black and brittle. Thana has never hoped as fiercely as she hopes in that moment between her caress and the creeping of death.
Her hope feels like a white-hot star throbbing where her heart should be.
@Ipomoea
