For a day she had waited in the graveyard with the blood specked leaves hanging a halo above her furious form. Each bone had whispered to her in tomes of rot, as the flesh turned to dirt and the worms had come to explore their new universe. The bodies beneath her had felt like home, like purpose, like a song she was made to sing in the way of blood, and rage, and fury. And in the silence, with her crown of a winter-dead forest, she had made her organs chant the notes of that song over and over. It was only eulogy she knew how to give the creatures feeding the roots beneath the lash of her tail.
For a day there was no sign of movement, no shadows for her to feast upon, and nothing for her to carve the patterns of all her rage into. Until suddenly there was--
It started as a coo in the leaves, the soft shush, shush, shush of horse hooves in the almost frozen loam. Everything in her, every bit of lingering wrath, opens up to answer that shush, shush of the forest. And when she moves there is still that halo of bloody leaves dancing painfully behind her eyes each time she blinks. Her own steps are not a hush but a war. Thana does not move silently through the copse, she does not need to.
Let them know I'm coming, she thinks, let fear ferment in their skin before--. The thoughts tumble around inside her, between her rot magic and her aching, haunted soul. They are gathering speed, and weight, and gravity like a hundred stones rolling down a mountain. Her joints ache to run with them, to charge through the forest like a rabid thing. It hurts to keep at her steady walk, to hurts to hold her empty spiral still instead of run the world through with it. It hurts.
It still hurts when she finds him by the river. There is youth in him, she can see it the curl of his neck, the whisper of his feathers in the wind, the brightness in his gaze. She moves closer. There is fury chained in each movement of her hooves on the river shore and wrath in the way her tail drags lines in the ground behind her. And there is only something other and primordial in the way she watches him with a wolf-like tilt to her head. She does not move closer, only waits and counts the throb of the life below the curl of his throat.
“Who are you.” Her voice doesn't lift as a question should, it only runs straight as a sword racing for the heart. And were it not for the tightness of her lips every curl of her face, every hollow, looks as if it belongs to a bear snarling in the black-woods.
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