It's the lie that settles Thana.
Although she doesn't know the words are nothing more than a story woven in the mind of a moon-child. It's easy enough for her to believe. Being a deer sounds easier than being magic and blood, wrath and hunger. It sounds easier than being a monster. She should wonder that a story has the power to make her feel monstrous, like a lion licking the curl of a lamb's neck. But she doesn't.
It's easier to be the lion than the lamb, the villain instead of the hero. It's so easy to be made and to be death.
And so Thana settles into all the things that are easy, because later there will be killing. She tells herself that in the end it'll be worth the pain, the suffering, the ache devouring the marrow of her bones (and taking from them the morrow). “You should not like me.” Each of the words is nothing more than a burned bit of paper, heavy with ink and flame, falling towards the sea. Each is a wish tossed over the cliff-side for the blackness to take. She speaks each word because she does not hunt deer, only the things that track them through the shadows.
The rot pulls away with her and starts to spread only the the darkness of her shadow, where the moon-girl's light cannot reach. Thana wants to pause a moment, to look at the rot, and the snow, and their steps crossing those spaces like constellations crossing the night sky (slowly, day by day, slowly). She does not. Things that dance like war do not pause, or linger, or dream.
“Thank you for the dance, Vae.” She says, and then she's gone. Only the tracks in the snow, ground and rimmed in black like an infection of the winter, leave any hint as to where the unicorn has gone to hunt.
Like a lion, and a wolf, and a thing caught between the two, Thana has gone to hunt something weightier than once-deer.
@vaeri
