For a moment, when the girl inhales with a look in her eyes that promises language instead of air, Thana wants to pull the girl's lungs from her chest. The urge hits her suddenly and her magic touches the thought gently, like a lover might touch a rose thorn, and bids it to grow root and unfurl. Her hooves do not flounder with the fury that takes her suddenly. They only become lighter while the rot around her hooves becomes dark and thick as oil. The air becomes cloying with the scent of it all, death crawling across the pristine snow.
And then the words come and it's not music, or magic, or want that rises in Thana's thoughts to meet it. It's fury, bloody and raw, tangling itself into a million words of annihilation. It's the memory of a bloody leaf, of holding a blade at her regent's throat, of sleeping in a mass grave with bones pillowing the wicked tip of her horn like a flowered meadow. “What do you know of forest creatures and secrets?” Despite the growl in her chest, and the want clanging against her teeth, her words are a quiet thing. They could be almost tame if not for the blaze in her eyes when she turns her head and lets her own steps slow and grow methodical.
Perhaps she had been madness and war before, a beast let loose upon the virgin glen, to make something more of it. But now with the tap of her horn against the girl's spine, like a knock begging to be let inside, Thana is something worse than madness.
The distance between them is an easy thing to devour. Thana takes it with nothing more than an exhale, like her own lungs are rabid to expel all the things blazing a winter storm across her gaze, like she wants something more than air filling up all the empty places beneath her skin. But what comes out is, “Thana,” in a way that suggests nothing more than a sigh and a forgotten word.
When her last hoof falls, before she freezes, there is only the sound of her name tumbling (like a stone in a riptide) in the small silent space between them. Only that and the blackness looping around around them as virgin as the snow once was.
@vaeri
