That small part of her, tangled in the growing rage, starts to wither. Like a birch in a forest it is the first to die, melding down into rot as all the light around it gets swallowed. Each time she breathes and each time her heart drums a war-chant, all the softness, all the aching suffocates in the rage. Every inch of her begs her to move closer, and her magic (that blood-borne magic) lashes against her muscles begging to be let out. It feels like a hurricane caged in her form, a wrath eager to make something new of this world.
At the tip of her tail, her blade trembles like a shard of bone should not, it rattles like a dead branch against a storm. Thana knows something important has been carved out of her. There is nothing more than a fiery, black sun blazing in the place where her heart should be. Each flame of hers, each wrathful flicker, burns colder than the spaces between stars. And it's that missing part, where there is only black ice, that would have seen more than joints locked together in a puzzle she only wants to desiccate.
She wonders if his feathers would sound like leaves when they hit the ground.
She wonders if his blood would sound like rain or like mist.
But she doesn't wonder how easy it would be tear him apart piece by piece. It's always easy, the flaying, the killing, the wrath. It's always easy, and she reads no innocence in the tilt of his head at her. It's only insolence she sees. Like a god she knows that his will, with his rippling feathers, is not the one in the world strong enough to resist her. The void always looks back, someone had told her that once.
And so she opens up her mouth and bares her teeth like razor blades. She looks through him and answers him at all once.
“My tracks came straight towards you.” A leaf behind her, falls to the ground dead. Worms rise out to feast on it, to feed the only cycle the forest knows. Like death it's the only thing the forest really knows. The winter belongs to Thana. “But it's not you that I'm looking for.” She offers no explanation but the lowering of her horn, the hollowness of it whispering in the almost-not-there breeze when as she angles it straight for his heart.
She wonders if he will sound like rain or like mist rolling in between the birch.
Her blade has not stopped its tremble, its death-knell-whisper. It's only crept closer and closer to the curl of her hip, more touch than weapon. And it's the last part of her alive in the suffocation of all this rage, that looks at him from a place beyond her thick lashes and her bared teeth. It's that part that screams at him. “Run.” It says.
And when it dies the void starts to close all the space between them.
There isn't much time left for wondering. The time for knowing has come and Thana doesn't know if she's praying he'll stay or if she's praying he'll run far, far, far from her forest.
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