The first leaf to fall on her spine and catch there turns to dust. The second turns to rot. The third, oh the third, turns to frost as if the winter in her bones is clawing viciously out of her skin. For a moment she's tempted to catch a leaf in her mouth, turn it to black rot ink and paint swirls of images that haunt her each time she closes her eyes to sleep on his neck. She wonders if he would understand it: the writ of her old world, the beast in her blood that calls through the shadows over and over again until she's shaking with the sound of it.
She wonders if he would see the art of it or the decay.
Instead of painting she only presses their shoulders together beneath the rain of the trees. The leaves sound like small bones crunching beneath the weight of her when she shifts. When the wind comes to shake the half-sleeping branches, Thana thinks it's not the wind at all but the forest screaming warning to its king. And oh she's glad he's not listening to the roots and the bark and the loam beneath her hooves crying out when winter comes early to this copse holding them close. She smiles and she knows the bark will see only the teeth in it-- not the sorrow, not the aching, only teeth.
Her tail drags a track through the leaves and it looks like a wound of leaves parting open to reveal the flesh of the earth below it. His eyes lift up toward the falling leaves and this time Thana does not follow the track of it. All she can see is winter anyway, winter and the way the branches look like bones tearing at the blue sky. A small part of her breaks that she cannot see whatever beauty it is that he can see.
She's always breaking around him.
It's cracks she's thinking about when he starts to speak, and for a moment she wishes that he would whisper it against her skin instead of the sky. Grow roots in me, she wants to say. Or maybe it's the need to say tell me what flowers bloom in winter, that circles around and around in her chest like a carrion bird over a corpse. “No.” Thana gives him the truth because she's still clinging like a dying thing to all those wanting words in her heart. The ones that are picking clean her rot.
She has never thought to wonder about the seasons the way she has wondered about the urge she has to cut open the secrets of this world. Thana has only thought to ponder the way of blood, and bone, and death, and wanting. Like a beast she's always wondered about the dark shadows rooting below the red leaves. And she does not need to ask Ipomoea which part of the forest he sees in winter.
“Would you not miss seeing the first bloom break through the snow? If it was always spring there would be only life and nothing for the forest to fight for.” This time she doesn't say the words against his skin nor does she paint in in rot across the plane of his cheek like she's aching to do. But she thinks the forest will know the difference when she looks at the knot of a tree looking back at her like an eye.
@ipomoea
