And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
There are times, like this one, where Thana wonders how strange and violent she must seem to the citizens of this place. Perhaps the thoughts are always there. Perhaps they are only muted by the steady low rumble of her hunger and the roar of her black magic. But perhaps, there are times where she loses herself to the core of her making. And always, like now, there are these thoughts below the wondering--
She starts to count his bones and the hairs curling up his too long ears. When he speaks she counts his teeth and listens to the snap of his jaw as it works around so many words. She wonders how he doesn't choke on them with a mouthful of berries. Eligos whispers please to her and she answers back, no.
He does not ask again.
A breeze whistles through her horn as she lets the silence go on too long. Moss and rot starts to grow around her hooves as the earth reaches up with weary loam for the death that's whispering to the roots. A hundred thoughts and a hundred ways to tear him apart run though her mind. Perhaps it's better that she wears no regent's crown upon her head. Perhaps it's better that there is only the hollow spiral of bone between her flashing, too wild eyes.
“We are not.” She offers the answer into the silence that has long since grown heavy. An itch whispers down her spine as her magic starts to trace map like patterns across her bones. Thana tries to trap it down, down, down so that the branches overhead do nothing more than bend towards her as they grow soft with water, mold and the creeping disease of death. Eligos steps closer to press his nose against her hock, hard enough that she might feel the ache of his teeth behind his lips.
Around her the grass starts to fold and wither. She drags her tail across the brown stalks, as if it might be possible to wipe clean the stain of death rippling out from the blackness of her shadow. “Who are you?” The scratch of magic down her spine makes the words rough as stone in a thunderclap. But it's enough, she hopes, to pull his eyes from the rot spreading outwards in jagged lines of black. She can feel the roots trembling beneath her hooves.
And when she steps closer to the stallion, Thana can almost imagine the forest screaming at her in rage. All the prose in the world will not, cannot, save it from her.
@Willfur
