Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Thana knows she should feel something when he steps deeper into the river to wash the echo of her teeth from his skin. There should be something there, turning over behind her eyes like wings over the wind, to see the water dip into the hollow of his chest and race against his legs like they are roots instead of an echo of desert sand pretending to be real. Part of her thinks it should be regret: a hollow ache or perhaps an echo of a hurt almost forgotten enough to lose its sharpness. Another part of her things it should be rage: a bellowing hurt that he would let the water wipe him clean instead of the tip of her horn.
She does not follow him into the current. Only her eyes follow him, tracing the pale echoes of sunlight scarring his cheeks where the water does not reach.
Eligos watches the lion with that same look: almost regret, almost rage, almost hunger. If they are two sides of a coin he is the heaviest, weighted down with all the parts of the desert everyone tries not to see. He is the monsters beneath the dunes, the bloated tunnels full of bones that have been filled in by sand. He is every echo of the murdering king that starved an entire culture. For each tooth that the lion bares, a beast is formed by the sand.
And each says, in the way of rage shaped into form, where were you god-creature when the world was burning? Because Eligos knows he was made, was formed, the only one of his kind, by the stone-hard weight of each moment in which no one came to save the suffering and end the violence.
His snarl still echoes above the river. What need does a monster have for almost-tender moments between a king and an immortal?
When he asks her why, Thana only blinks at him slow as a monster waking up into the first light of day. Behind her teeth, salted as seed on her tongue, is the name Ipomoea begging to taste the air. And for a moment Thana is about to tell him, this king with his skin begging to be shed. For a moment she wants to let him carry the weight of it, how each bit of her soul is heavier by the day as it reforms (how it makes her angry, and settled, and like a comet each night).
For a moment she wishes for the desert canyon and the screaming hawk.
For a moment she wishes for the feel of her horn across his neck, for the whisper of magic leeching out from his blood.
The name on her tongue dies beneath the weight of her teeth, guarded and tucked away like a secret buried with all the bone tunnels in the sand. Like a forgotten treasure only the gods know. Thana pulls away, back to the shore with Eligos who is still begging the lion to come closer.
She lays her nose against a golden horn, breathes in the violence. And still she does not stop watching the king washing away her touch. In the fur of her bonded she smiles, a sharp-tooth grin as hungry as the looks of the lion and the monster. She pulls away with the smell of the desert thick enough to taste, even here in the forest Eligos cannot wash the desert from his fur.
Thana aches with the need to step closer to something old, to carve out the bits of him that are begging for freedom. “I cut out the emptiness.” She says he words to bury the ache as she turns away. But before she dissolves back into her forest, she looks over her shoulder just once at him.
The look she gives him is a weighted thing, like stones begging to be tied to legs and returned to the sea. It's hot too, molten, when she whispers just barely loud enough to rise over the racing of the river. “And when you're ready I can cut it out of you too.” Thana leaves, the trail of rot painting infinity patterns on the shore the only sign she was there at all.
With a final snarl Eligos follows, leaving their forest to the remnants of the desert. For now.
