If there is a winter in his voice instead of spring she does not hear it. Each word, each flare of a nostril, each curl of a lip, each kiss of wind lifting up his mane only seems to her like a sapling in the golden-ray. Above them the branches are still stretching out like bones and below the roots like veins aching beneath the weight of her horror. And despite it all there is only that pine eye watching the way she breathes in the sound of his voice like it's the west wind and she's moonlight hidden behind a cloud. Like she's waiting. She's always waiting, waiting, waiting.
She breathes in again, pulling him into lungs made for running until sweat forms patterns across her chest. And when she touches him again it's with lips made for tasting rot, and blood, and death (not skin, not spring, not Ipomoea and still she traces the curl of his mane anyway). Her tail, made for rending muscle from bone and bark from trunk, wraps around his ankle like another root of the forest begging to keep him. “Before you I didn't know that green was anything but something begging to die.” Thana breathes the words into his mane and it ends in teeth when she scrapes a path down to the skin hiding his heart from the end of her horn.
His heartbeat pulses beneath her nose and her own heart stutters, rattles, and starts to sing a new song. Her soul thinks it sounds like running, and hunting, and becoming. Thana thinks it sounds like the woods curling like a cage around a golden sapling with frost wrapping tenderly around its leave. It is a brittle song but she pulls it down like the desert pulls down water.
A seed in her belly starts to grown roots.
“I was not made to miss the green.” Her voice is as glass-thin as the song singing in the crevices of her heart. She knows, oh she knows, that she was made for horror and gore, for killing and taking. But she wants the green of his crown as much as she wants to sink deep into the white-waters that hurt again. She wants. She aches.
Thana plucks a flower from him crown, because she doesn't know how to give as well as she knows how to take. “But I would miss it because of you.” She whispers around the flower.
And then she presses Ipomoea's own flower to his lips--
Like a kiss of spring in the dead of winter.
@ipomoea
