The rise of the feathers so close to his spine reminds her of the language of wolves and coyotes. It reminds her of how wild things are made to greet each other in the dark woods. It is the only language she understands, the way of tooth and claw, fear and violence, promise and wrath. And if she had feathers she still would have greeted him with nothing but the flash of her teeth and the whispering sigh of her horn through the winter chill. She wonders if he can see it on her, the way she is nothing like him, the way there is only an abyss in the glittering, harsh purple of her gaze.
Or can he only see the way she's aching to devour something, anything, to stave off the violence dragging her down like cement in the tide?
“Does anyone ever knock at that door?” There is magic in her voice, the rot rolling white and heavy as fermented fruit below her skin. It is not her way to think in the space between literal and poetic. It is not her way to talk instead of cleave, or feel the way her heart flutters more like a hornet than a butterfly.
What is her way is the steadiness of her gaze on him as he starts to move. She looks all lion instead of wolf now as her tail ticks, ticks, ticks, a metronome against the icy stones on the shoreline. She looks hungry. Her own hooves make no effort to reflect his. But the rot spreading out from her widens in a promise that all the steps in the world could not, cannot, save him should she decide to move.
It's not until he looks at her with his gaze turned hard and weaponized that she does nothing more than track his movements and tap her warning song. Her smile is all teeth, all claw, all violence barely held between the cage of her flesh. It's all waiting, and wanting, and memories of bodies shredded like paper beneath the blood freckled leaves. “No one is just a wanderer.” Everything in her that's god and beast bellows to close the distance between them and peel back his flesh to discover what else he might be.
Thana finds it almost impossible to remember that she's supposed to be more than death now. Almost.
She inhales the scent of the water, and her rot, and the musk that's settled on his skin from her forest. All of it backs up the flare of his feathers and the shape of his voice around the word wanderer. And yet--
Her magic is still roaring in her blood and heart is still humming like a hive of hornets. She has no idea how to be soft, or gentle, or anything but this boy's death looking at him from behind the shield of a unicorn's form. “Tell me what you know about the creatures living in this forest.” Thana demands of him instead of answering his question. The ability to smile, to do anything but become sharper, and harder, and wilder, had gone with the meeting and the grave.
Once she had heard someone say that the forest is alive. That it's watching them all.
But here, by the shore and the river, with the boy who has no name but wanderer it only feels dead. And had she remembered how to be soft, she would have worried that it was dead because of her. She doesn't. She only looks at him with the dead forest all around them and thinks about blood.
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