All it takes is one line of music for her to start wondering at all the ways in which to pull it loose.
Would it fray like a rope? Would it spill like blood from a mortal wound? Would it run like ink between the mortar of the cobblestone streets?
Is it sweeter in or out?
The wondering is what brings her to the gathering in the center of the court. It's what makes her linger by a small garden and what makes her stay long enough that someone's treasure turns to dust and decay at the edges of her shadow. Wonder lives in the blaze of her violet eyes, a roar of hunger silent in the throat but deafening in the form of her. Each drop of her wondering, each itch scraping dark marks across her spine, each rotten seed blowing in the wind around her like a dead wish---
Each drop turns her into something else, something profane instead of holy, something born to worry at the knots of the universe until it crashes down in comet dust around their heads (until it chokes them all to death, all that dust, all that almost life). Thana is that other thing when the boy at the center of the gathering, with poetry on his life and something in his heart wanting for death, turns his gaze to her.
Thana looks back. Every drop of her magic rises to meet his searching, hungry gaze and everything in her says This. She steps closer. This is what real hunger looks like.
Eligos presses his nose to her hip. She can feel the scrape of his teeth, one small thing to ground her to more violence instead of the stone and dead earth at her hooves.
The song continues on, rising notes that bring her magic to the surface of her skin. Frost cracks along the hollow spiral of her horn. Ice glimmers in the facets of the stone hanging upon her brow. Never has there been a moment like this, with the crowd watching her as cautiously as lambs watching a lion that has appeared in the center of their flock. He is close enough now for her to hear the emotion in his song, when she digs under the hunger roaring in her bones. She can see too the shine of his eyes, the way their color is an innocent, youthful echo of hers.
Something whispers inside her bones, a ghost memory of the time before flesh and bone. You've never been young. You were never innocent. All she can do it give in to the whispers, lay herself bare before the aching and the sin the same way the boy is laying bare the pulse at his throat.
Thana still wants to hear what music sounds like when it is out.
She closes the small distance he was not brave enough to take (part of her wonders if it's a lamb's instinct, an echo of the way the crowd skims just along the outside of her shadow and never in it). There is barely a trace of the forest on him, of the wild, of the world laying just beyond the cusp of this tame, quiet version of Delumine. It settles her a little, just enough that she only lays her horn against the curl of his lips where a dark echo of his song is still alive.
“Have you been waiting long?” Her voice is a pale reflection of his sultry poetry. It's a rasp of rust in the winter, frost on a sapling, the tap, tap, tap of death begging for a way in. But perhaps there is music in the way she touches her nose to his and inhales all his echoing song like she's been suffocating for an eon.
Or maybe, in the end, it is only hunger.
@Oliver
