There is a moment, when her horn pierces his skin, that she thinks about how easy it would be to kill him. She teeters on the edge of that thought, like it's cloud and she's the moon deciding whether to glow or to dim, and wonders if she should toss her body into the abyss with a furious joy. He's seaweed on her tongue,
something holy and salted and full of a trove of priceless metals. Beneath the point of her horn, and the feel of how soft he is, Thana trembles like a dying thing. It feels like each drop of her blood is sinking into the clay and limestone at their hooves.
And she does not know what will be left when her body disintegrates.
In their shadows her tail starts to thrash and cleave great jagged lines into the sand. There is nothing graceful about the movement. It's both too feral and hungry to be the patient twitch of a lion's tail. The gesture is more rabid than anything. She's all scorpion backed into a corner with badger teeth clacking spit and fury at her. His poem is driving her mad, mad, mad.
All at once Thana is the stag and the wolf. She's running through the forest and there is life in her eyes and death in her blood. They are fighting, and raging, and tumbling together between the light and darkness of the edge she's swaying on. It feels like there is a frayed noose around her neck and it's pulling tighter, tighter, tighter.
She's swinging. She's screaming.
She's aching, always aching.
Her horn is sinking deeper into his skin just as the wolf and stag racing through her heart sink into the tissue of it. She almost tosses her self over the edge. She almost kills him. Can he feel it, the way everything in her is aching to feast on everything in him, the way she wants to tear him down just to see the color of his soul? She presses her shoulder into his. She presses her horn into his golden (so golden!) skin--
The stag dies, and the wolf settles down to sleep with its belly full of flesh, blood, and gore. Thana's soul settles even though the trembling of her skin continues. When she pulls away the sunlight makes the blood on her horn look like rubies, it gleams in the corner of her gaze when she lifts her nose towards the blood pooling like tears on his skin. She presses her nose to the wound, hard enough that she knows he will feel the sting of her almost-kiss.
She doesn't say anything about his poem. She knows he could feel the why she trembled against him like both the dying thing and the hungry hunter.
Thana presses her lips harder into the blood, she draws spirals with it across his skin. Arcane marks that only the death magic pooling hot in the marrow of her bones understands. When she whispers against him she can taste brine and sand on her tongue (she wants the sea and the drought all at once). “I don't write.” She says the words on the curl of a bloody spiral and she says it with teeth.
Wolves do not write. Kings do and Thana is anything but royal.
“But if I did it would be about the way your skin is begging to die. I would write about a the forest in winter and way everything is dead and we call it sleep. Maybe I would write about the way your blood is more lovely out than it is in.” She's running out of blood for the spirals by the time she pauses. He's still on her tongue, lingering like rot and fermented fruit. His eyes are so blue, blue as the winter-sea, blue as the noon-sky.
Thana remembers another sea. She remembers another horse she wanted to tear apart and save all at once. And oh, oh, oh she wants to tear this golden boy apart with his words that sink into the tissue of her heart like disease. She wants to press their sides together too, until their ribs fall in line one after the other. When she puts distance between them it makes her hungry, but she pulls away anyway.
His blood still looks like rubies on the point of her horn. The glare makes her hungry too.
“Perhaps it's better I don't know the sound of poetry.” Because she would want to learn it as well as she knows the way of form and flesh. And she would want to pull it apart piece by piece in just the same way.
It is the way of the wolves, and unicorns, and sharks.
@orestes
