They way he says learned makes it sound like something simple, something as easy to understand as the way her heart pushes rot and death through her veins. Or maybe he's only saying it like a prayer to a new-god, one full of only hope instead of greed, or love instead of wrath. Perhaps she's only grasping on to the sound of it, the way he makes it seem so simple, in the only way she knows how to hold onto anything-- by teeth and throat, blood and bone.
Thana holds on with her gaze until she wonders if he can feel the layers of them peeling back to reveal all the cracked, hollow and wanting holes in themselves. Do I look like the moon in the twilight fog? She wants to breathe the question into him until she can see whatever it is that he can see reflected back to her in the eyes. But all she can see is the same thing looking back. There is no answer to the wanting in her.
Nor is there all the stories of the trees waiting golden and petaled on his tongue.
She closes her eyes, hard, until she can see lighting racing across the black like a flock of birds heading towards the desert in the midnight snow. She counts each of his breaths against her face, and the way she can feel blood rushing beneath his skin (is it reaching for the death rushing below hers?). She gives him some of her weight, just enough to feel the rot of her, the way it's so much heavier than life is.
It's only when he might bear it, all this aching, pressing against his skin that she speaks again. “And when you learn it, will you tell me?” She does not ask if, there is no space in her darkness for if, no crack in the bones filling the space between her wicked horn and her wicked tail that if might rest in (if only for a little while). She is all hard edges, all promises that when he learns it she might pluck him open to discover the way.
And still, still, still---
She wants to ask him if she looks like the moon in the twilight fog.
But Thana has never been asked what she wants and it makes her inhale sharply. The air feels like needles in her throat and the fog pools in her lungs like sludge. She trembles like a lion dreaming of running lambs, like everything in her body is trying fiercely to come out. Her magic sighs in her blood like it's reminding her that she's bone and black magic, rot and mold. “I would become anything.” She says.
Then because she's a unicorn, “I want to be everything.”
And if the magic in the center of her had a face it would have smiled.
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