Every curtain in the room is still fraying as the fury around her grows, and grows, and grows. It grows roots and bones, and skin enough to breathe. And Thana waits beneath it, in it, as it, while they all spit furious words at each other like bile. There is still the whining of her tail as she keeps dragging it across the stones. Over and over again screech, screech, like a blade against a cage. She almost wonders how they can bare it, words instead of war, form instead of fury, pain instead of death.
And she knows, the moment the regent opens his mouth to spit, that she is nothing like the rest of them. She knows she will never be.
All the threads her magic had been plucking loose turn to dust, like they've been left out for a season by the sea. She doesn't care if they notice or not, she doesn't care if they see it in her eyes, the look that says she knows how to pluck them all loose hair by hair. When she moves between them once the silence falls, it's not as another horse, or a unicorn. It's as one of the creatures in the pit, as a thing full of blood and magic and death. She does not care that the stone is aging and loosening beneath her hooves.
Thana does not stop until she's beside the regent with his horns and that old, ancient tree carving it's way up his shoulder like a bit of bone bared to the world. And when she lifts her blade it's with purpose and a deadly, hungry sort of speed. It stops far below the curl of his throat-- waiting, waiting, waiting. Her eyes are blazing in a purple dark enough to be black. “Tell me I know nothing.” The sound of her voice isn't a yell, nor is it fury. Her voice is a tolling bell somewhere, it's a promise, it's an echo of all the poisonous magic rushing through her veins where blood should be. And her silence does not scream when she drops her bladed tail back to the floor.
It purrs.
“You say you have lived for a century, you say you know the forest better than anything else in this room. You can say a hundred things about what you are and I still--” Her magic rolls like a tide below her skin, her rot. It begs her to pull his antlers apart tine by tine, it begs her blade to rise up again and see what color his blood runs. It begs a hundred things of her and Thana swallows it all down because she was about to say I still could learn how to end you. The words feel like a hundred blades running down her throat. Each of them makes her bleed, and bleed, and bleed. “You say you have lived in the forest longer than we have been here and still the creatures that lived with you are dead.” Her horn aches upon her brow. For war, and fury, and wrath it aches.
There is the same vengeance in her horn as there is in her steps when she moves away from the regent, and looks at the rest of the room like a lion looking at lambs. She knows she should not have come, should not have pretended to be anything but a beast roaming the endless forest waiting, and hunting, wanting. When her gaze stops on the mare brave enough to spit back at the other lambs, there is a song there, one hoping she might understand. If there are notes to it, to the embers of Thana's look, it's saying do not go back.
Before she leaves the room she turns to look right at the Warden sitting there with his papers, and his plans, and there is only war in the way her eyes meet his. “No one is going with me.” Still her voice is nothing more than the tolling of that bell and her blade is still that shovel on a gravestone. The curtain closest to her tumbles to the ground, more dust now than cloth. “I am not going to patrol or hunt.” She says, but it's the words that she doesn't say that fall into the aching, hollow space between the two of them.
Thana is going to kill.
When she leaves she does not pause to look at Ipomoea, or his regent, or any of the others that are more horse than monster. And in her wake, in each hollow hoof-print, there is only decay, rot and death.
