Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
And the unicorn evils run them through;
It feels like the light is only feigning dead as he comes closer wearing more than the night she's claimed. There is silence coating him too, thicker than the algae fat water around her hooves and heavy as horn upon her brow. And when she inhales it in the moment right before his call, it only tastes to her like a bitter void waiting. It tastes like the possibility of violence-- like home, oh, it tastes like home.
His call sounds like the sea, like a cry of a stag laying on the shore with his throat cut open and his life flickering faster, fainter, frantic like a dead star. Thana smiles for the sound of it, her look just as savage and just as blunted as his. And she doesn't answer back (not yet, not yet) when the dying sound dies, she only keeps her teeth bared in the silence. Perhaps it's only the look of a wolf waiting for a throat, or of a void waiting for the bellow of a falling thing.
Or perhaps she says nothing because Eligos is there snarling in echo of the siren scream He sounds like thunder in the desert-- all sand and wind and storm song. The shore rocks sing hush, hush, hush as he comes closer to the river choked by magic. Thana doesn't release her hold on it when he starts to talk about poetry. But she thinks it would be easy, to swallow back her magic like bile and let the river wash him far away from her forest.
“Something old.” She greets him but it's not the sound of her voice she can hear. It's only the hunger of her heart echoing in her ears, her bones, her magic. It roars as she closes the distance between them and brushes her nose against the pulse below his throat.
Eligos is still snarling. He has not fallen silent like the forest and the river.
Thana is still almost silent, her hungry heart an echo only she can hear, as she breathes in the desert, sea and sun of his skin. There's blood there too, she can feel it running, running, running like a stag before a rabid wolf. Her own chases after it, the wolf leaping off the cliff savoring the wind and the meal to come. She still thinks his blood would be lovelier out than in. “Do you want me to answer back tonight?” The smile on her lips turns to a dark thing, a bloody thing, a monstrous thing that wants a shadow of blood instead of river moss.
The river starts to run again. It races for the sea. Thana drags her teeth across the outer shell of his ear and whispers hush, hush, hush to him. Once he burned and she wonders if he will again. Thana prays for it as much as any savage, wild thing might pray. Like a howl at the moon, she prays.
“The sea could be full of more than the dead tonight.” She says, and when she pulls away it's to look at the quiet forest holding its breath.
Please. Eligos says like he always does and Thana does not look at him in the same way she always does when he asks. There is only violence between them, only monstrous things, and she cannot look for it it yet. Not yet.
The desert sun might not be not here tonight but monsters are.
And Thana is not sure that the sun something to be missed.
