This is how Thana discovers she's a monster, by the way his back breaks the sunlight like an arrow. She learns in the way he falls to his knees before her like she is the true death god and she has just set her hungry teeth against the throat of something he loves. She can read in the way the forest shivers not in fear but in some slumbering sort of rage it is just learning how to awaken from.
She is the wicked thing in the wood.
The trees hate her. She can feel it in the quiver of their roots that her magic is trying to drink life from. It's in the way she's breathing winter against their summer-green leaves no matter how hard she tries to breathe deep enough that warm air and pollen are they only things she can possibly exhale. Its all seems impossible now, to imagine that she could be anything bathed in gold between a cathedral of ancient oaks. How foolish it seems now to wonder on the way she trembled like a doe when he talked to her of the way the trees spoke.
She watches him grow leaves to replace the ones the she exhaled death over. She knows it's not the same as saving the sapling, because part of it is already dead and the new leaves surely cannot have the save memories as the rotten ones. But it feels like he saved it when the sun strikes golden again through the enraged canopy and makes each leaf gleam as bright as emerald.
Ipomoea looks up at her from beyond the sapling and the stone on her brow has never felt so heavy as this. And she knows it's not the stone but her heart that feels like a world pulling her down. It's so much easier to blame it all on a thing hanging below her horn. She feels a little like that monster of a god again, when she looks at him with his flowers and his small wings laid so low before her.
Thana wonders if the dead leaves feel cold beneath his knees, or if he can hardly tell them apart from all the loam and pine-needles.
“I would bring nothing good to your city.” Each word does not fall like a stone (although she wants them to so badly it aches) but it's a whisper of sound barely loud enough to sound like more than a sigh. It could so easily have been, don't let me leave, for all the darkness and hope blazing the start of a newborn universe in her gaze.
She turns back to run away from the canopy rustling out a warning to her (she can hear it like a roar echoing in her bones). But before she does, Thana steps close enough to press her lips against the tip of his ear. She exhales, just once.
And then she's gone racing away from the dead rotten leaves and the man with the power to do something that feels almost like salvation.
@Ipomoea
