She can see it in him before it surfaces, that pulse of fury spiraling up, up, up towards the outside of his skin. Her own magic, her own violence snarls to see it, to see the way he spirals just like the bloody drawings she marked him with (claimed him with). How often had her own violence felt like this? Like her heart was going to leap free of the cage and bare its teeth and bones at the world. It feels like that now when he glows, and burns, and the world ebbs towards the side of violence with him.
It fees like her magic is going to unmake her, flip her inside-out until she's all teeth, and organ, and bones whittled down to sharp points.
And so Thana answers him. Because she is shark, and unicorn, and wolf at the full moon.
Her own magic rises, furious and wild and cold, cold, cold. It leaks through her pores, rot and dust and death. She imagines what his heart will feel like pressed against the tip of her horn; she imagines how his veins might flutter in the wind like flags. She imagines how his eyes might tremble beneath her skin as she presses them closed, how they might see the true color of white just one final time. She imagines how the curl of his neck might feel again pressed against hers, how like the center of the earth his skin might feel if she pressed her lips in a kiss at the hollow of his throat.
She imagines unmaking him and making him.
When he asks her the first question she does not answer in the way of the horses in this world. She answers him in the way of the wild, of the forest, of the rift-magic hungry to eat a world. It's there, her reply, her howling hello to his violence, in the tilt of her horn as she lowers it across his spine. It's in the thud, thud, thud of stones against the curl of it, in the way it sounds like knocking. She rests it across his spine as he curls into her and as his fire makes her skin froth white as a wave on a storm sea. And if her horn is saying anything at all besides hello, it's a begging plea to make art out of the prefect curl of his spine.
His fury makes all her nerve-endings feel alive and she has never felt like her soul was so cold as it is now pressed tight against the sun. She has never felt so alive, as alive as death might feel standing in the middle of a civil-war, like the world is stretching out endlessly before her and it's black, and rotten, and begging to be taken. Her eyes spark and blaze at him and the urge to ask him, am I the reason you write then?, is strong enough to taste like acid and dust when she licks at the backs of her snarling teeth.
Perhaps the words do not come, perhaps nothing comes out but the feral, aching, wanting growl of her violence, but it's there, the asking, in the ashes of her gaze, in the ember-amethyst. The asking is in the one small promise of softness her form knows how to give.
“I cannot.” She says the words as he pulls back and each is a bolt of lightning, a hail to all the wicked things she's made of. It's hard and full of teeth and wanting that she does not know how to hide. Even when he softens and turns to nothing but a horse she cannot pull them back. She wants to scar him, she wants to pluck that sun-god inside him loose. She wants to burn, and burn, and burn. She wants to hurt again. And even though she doesn't want to think it, the thought is there, like an itch, that maybe a gallon of blood might bring him back.
Thana closes her eyes hard enough that she can see only white and feel only the sting of it. Each inhale she takes is sharper than the last, shallow and harsh. She's breathing like a dying thing on a battlefield, like the last one alive in a pile of corpses. She's breathing like she's praying. “I cannot shout or yell into the void.” The words are between those shallow breaths and she trembles like she's been running for miles and miles. Because she still wants to make and unmake him, she still wants that gallon of blood and that kiss against the hollow of his throat.
And when she opens her eyes to look at him she wonders that he cannot see all the ways in which she can do nothing with the void. She wonders why he cannot see it when her wolf is calling to his sea upon a desert throne. How can he not see there is no void in Novus but her?
Her froth must seem like sea-foam, she thinks, when she presses their necks together. And her voice must sound like a wave at the bottom of the sea when she lifts her nose to his ear and says, “but if you do I will answer back.”. The blade at the end of her tail taps a knock, knock, knocking song against a stone fallen out of place in the wreckage of his fury. Or maybe it sounds like a drumbeat.
Maybe it's nothing more than a battle-cry she was made singing.
Her tail is still tapping when she slides her nose down his face to his lips. And it is still knocking, drumming, tapping when she breathes her air right into his lungs.
Knock, Knock. “Always.” Knock.
@orestes
