The hum in her skin is singing, home, home, home. This nothing like the aimless rage of the poacher hunt, or the wishing to unmake the desert king, this is not the fury as the forest dies around her and the court looks on at their strange, strange warrior. This is home, this song of tooth, horn and claw. The burning of magic, and wrath, and war, explodes through her skin.
Inside she is exploding but outside the world is unmaking itself, dissolving to eons of decay. It is imploding, folding up itself and the skin of this black stallion. It is all begging entrance to his bones, his form, his foolish violence that sought to drown her. Thana is still laughing as she drives him into the river by way of horn, blade, Eligos, and his sand wolves.
And like a black bull he goes.
Each of the sand wolves follow him, their forms floating away with the current. Eligos pulls back with his golden, bloody smile of jagged teeth. Together they watch the bull float down the river like a corpse caught in the rose-stained current. She can hardly feel the sting of her wounds, or the hot touch of blood running down her neck. All she can feel is the omnipresent hunger, the song in her skin still singing home, home, home.
Thana steps closer to the current, close enough that the water lashes against her hooves and algae clings to her violently. And in that current she wonders how quickly she might follow him downstream, how quickly she might finish what the stones have started. How quickly she might render him nothing more than a bit of bone at the bottom of the sea.
But there are a million more days spreading out before her. And the hunt, the anticipation, lures her back into the forest. Be it in a day, a month, a year, an eon-- Thana will find the black bull again.
Later. Thana and Eligos say. Later.
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