She knew the moment she killed the first flower who was in the forest. She followed the trail of them anyway, never once pausing to wonder on the way they all turned paper thin and black-veined the further she walked into the garden in the sleeping forest.
Overhead there are empty birch branches echoing the sunlight back at her like pearls. Maybe she should know it as birch and the dead leaves whispering underneath her hooves as winter. Maybe she should know a hundred things about this forest that still doesn't feel like home. All she knows is that she can feel the fear of the forest pressing in, how it feels nothing like frost when she pauses to press her nose into a scar running long and jagged down the side of a tree.
Thana only touched it because it reminded her of lightning, of running tough the nothing like a bloody wound cleaving open the white.
She knew the tree would start to die instead of slumber and she touched it anyway .
Ahead of her the last golden and red leaves are falling down, down, down like feathers plucked. For a moment she pauses to watch them drift down. She admires the beauty of it, the loveliness of the leaves during their last moment alive. When she inhales just before they hit the ground she can taste the rot of the dead-flower trail and the sting of winter's promise.
It reminds her of home, of death, of how it felt to look over a cliff at the sea and wonder.
The blackness barely makes a sound as she starts to walk again, to follow that trail of flowers like a wolf following a wounded stag. Later she'll tell him how the flowers gave him away, how easy to was to follow his trail of beauty, how easy to was to make it wither at the slightest touch. She wonders how quickly he can save it all-- all these dying things spreading out like a flood from the rain of her.
Soon it's not leaves floating down around her but the weight of him and the forest pressing in. This air tastes like spring and hope. It tastes like a hundred flavors she will never know the name of. It tastes like color. She moves closer to him, close enough to count the flowers on his crown and the bones hiding just beneath the healthy glow of his skin.
She knows she should ask him what it means to be a champion. Because she wonders if he knows she cannot name the feeling blooming red in her heart even though she can name a hundred ways in which to spill his blood in great gardens of life upon the forest floor. She knows she should ask him a hundred things.
All that comes out is a whispered, “Ipomoea”, across his shoulder when she presses her lips to it.
@ipomoea
