Perhaps there should be some terror in being death or in feeling blackness rush in sharp-shard fury through her heart. Thana knows she should wonder on it, the aching of her heart when it pushes out sludge instead of bright life-blood. And maybe that's the magic of her-- the black, the rot, the coldness bright as lightning streaking wild and ravenous through the snow.
She can taste magic (and death, like a memory, death) in the flavor of him when she licks the last of it from her lips like a wolf licking a doe from her whiskers. The space between them seems like an thing inhaling deep of dust and for a moment she looks away from him at the sand. To her it seems that it is breathing too, just as the roots of the forest dream of stars does when the wind comes to howl an eulogy to the leaves. Her own lungs stutter once, just long enough that she might align her breathing to that of the world, like a star shifting in the night sky to form the point of a constellation.
When she tosses her forelock from her eyes it makes her feel like a savage thing, more lion shaking off seeds and snow instead of unicorn shaking of sun and dust. Underneath the wild gesture her voice seems a quiet thing, softer than rust flaking off in the rain. “Yet here you are,” her pause is shorter than the death of a star, “not old enough to be dead.” The look in her eyes is all wild, all snow on moonlight, all sickle bent horn. It asks,are you dead and I only missed it in the golden glow of your skin? And she does not pause to think that he might not understand the fury in her form, or the way her shoulders shiver under her gaunt skin as if a hundred flies have landed upon her like carrion birds.
Have their necks not already arched like two mountains leaning into the valley, saying I am here, and I am falling into the magma too.
Thana still does not move closer when he opens up more space between them. She does not open her throat to sing to him of the wolves and the wild and the winter again. Instead she thinks about bedding down between the stone elk with their stone fear and their silent, heavy hearts. She thinks about the magic curdling in her blood and how she can only see lightning and decay every time she blinks.
And she thinks about golden sun on a sapling frosting over and turning black.
“No magic abandoned me.” At her hooves a rock is starting to crumble as if the wind has been pushing sand against it for years and years. The lines her tail is drawing in the dirt start to bloom black-rot-moss facing the sun. When she inhales the air tastes not like sand but like the forest floor where the worms reign on their thrones of bone and brittle fur. If there are any bones beneath the sand they are all bleached and worn by the time she finally takes back that distance between them like it's her throne, like it's her right. “It came here too.”
Her teeth ache to touch him, to whisper the ocean roar back into his throat like the sickle moon singing a weak siren song back to the sea. “What does it feel like to be...” When she pauses there's a look in her twilight gaze, like there are words stumbling over each other in a furious current. Already she's forgotten what question she wanted to ask him, because the hawk is looping lazy over their heads again as if there are bones around them waiting to be picked clean.
And by the time she remembers what she wanted to ask, all that comes out below the curling of her nose to her chest is-- “lost.” It sounds like a prayer, like gold on a sapling, like the secret to making her black-blood flow 'right' through her aching heart.
@orestes
