Thana knows about a hundred other things--
She knows the way sea-mist gathers on eyelashes in the winter and the way it freezes into sharp-edged diamonds. If there is any beauty in the unraveling of flesh from muscle, muscle from bone and veins from between the tangle of a skull she knows the art of it. She knows all the patterns of black and sunlight and how leaves look blooming from dead branch. There are so many things she knows, so many bits of this world she's pulled apart like a meal.
But she does not know anything about poetry.
If there is anything elegant about the barbed mess of words rolling around and around like a stone down a hill in her mind she does not know it. She's too wild, too black, too hungry, too wanting, to know about unfinished things. And if she knew she was unfinished, nothing more than a hundred lines of other stories woven together into something grotesque, she would have torn down every poet into veins and broken bones. If only she knew--
He twines around her like a snake, like a lion opening up its mouth and wondering at the last moment if teeth growling beneath it are poisonous at the last moment. Everything in her that is unicorn, and feral, and death opens a salt-crusted eye and starts to pay attention. The part of her that is female, and jewel crowned, and wanting starts to wonder if there is anything about poetry that she should know.
And Thana, the part of her that is just Thana, wants to pull him apart as much as she wants to press her chest to his so that their hearts might howl together at the moon as they pull it down, down, down.
In the end she only waits there, tucked below him like a secret (like a sickness waiting for just the right angle of the sun in the sky) with her eyes closed against all the blood-red sand around them. If her blood is calling out the same scream of the hungry hawk she does not give away that song to him. “I don't know what that sounds like.” She says even as she wonders if the trick to it is in the blood humming so close to the point of her horn or if it's in the valleys between the mountains softly gleaming on his skin. Or maybe it's in the way their shadows stretch out long and low like a horizon across the sand. Maybe it's just another one of the million things she does not know.
“But maybe that means I'm lost.” Because there are walls in her future and death in her wake and everything in her is screaming at her to run, and kill, and feast until this world is nothing more than molecules. Even now there is a monster in her chest and it's as cruel as this longing aching in her heart for another touch, another whisper of his sea to her wolf.
And she still doesn't know if she wants to pull whatever a poem is from his chest or if she wants him to trace the white cracks on her skin again.
She doesn't know.
Even when she turns her head to rest the tip of her horn against his skin (a warning and a wanting) she's not sure what that iron, dusty taste on her lips is. It's like brine and not-brine all at once. Another horse might have smiled against him and the way he almost touches her in the same way roots almost touch the edge of a steep cliff. But she's a unicorn and so she only presses her horn against him, hard enough that they both might feel the weight of it, and says “finish it.”. Like the words mean anything to her at all.
@orestes
