She does not think to miss the wind. It is the same way she does not think to miss the winter, or the ocean, or the silver-cool moonlight. Although maybe she does not think to miss anything because death does not lament. It only rejoices, in the black, it rejoices.
Thana does however, miss the silence when the stallion comes close enough that she can see the lines of white running along the curl of his rib-cage. Like scars, she thinks. The willow sighs a welcome to him in the same way it had to her. A brush of leaf across the dip of a spine, a whisper where the wind should have been instead. She does not wonder how it feels to him. But she does wonder (on a shallow inhale) if the roots are talking about the stallion who does not know how to be silent.
Now she always finds herself wondering what the trees say, and the rocks, and the rotting loam beneath her hooves.
She wishes she wouldn't.
When he comes closer still, her eyes ache with the need to turn away from the glass-water, and the quail moving whisper quick through the whippoorwills. The bird had been tracking something in the shadows between stalks that she hasn't been able to make out. Thana thought it was like watching something primordial, honest and raw. It made her feel like there was still water stretching out around her body in white sun-light. Like she was dripping molten stars instead of summer sweat and willow pollen.
His voice is sharp in the silence (a clumsy blade, lost and loose). The quail takes to the sky with a screech and Thana flinches as the sudden loss of all that silence, stillness and death.
She wishes he didn't.
“Life.” Her own voice is as rough and whisper-thin as the willow painting lines across their backs. It's the not-there wind on the rocks and the sound sunlight makes on still water. For once her horn does not howl in the air (like a thing scenting some bloody trail in the black forest) when she turns to face him. If her eyes spark it's only with distant lighting, bright but easy to miss.
Their shoulders brush softly, almost soft enough to be nothing more the way to things pass between each other in space-- close but not close enough. She inhales. He smells like bonfires and sweat and bodies that do not know how to be wild.
“What do you see?” Thana asks and she does not think to miss the wondering.
@
