This is what happens when a child finds a lion who has long lived with the entropy of hunger.
There is the thrill of danger, the headiness of feeling skin and tooth and fur. And perhaps the lion's eyes glimmer softly like it's only waking up from a long slumber. Perhaps there is innocence too in a beast driven by instinct instead of cruelness.
But the hungry lion will still open its mouth and swallow the child. It will not taste the sweet singing screams, and lament at the fragile crack, crack, crack of bone. The lion will only feel the purr of abated hunger, it will only feel the blood. And then the lion, that sleepy lion, will crawl back into its cave and start to dream.
Thana is looking at the singing boy like a lion.
She lets him see the dreaming of her gaze and the glory of her horn when the light snags on it like liquid silk. She inhales the sweetness of his sultry voice and basks in the sunny glare in his eyes. And when she stretches, and her neck cracks like a gunshot, Thana wakes up.
The crowd pulls back, some of them see it. Some of they listened well to their parents when they were tucked in a night and warned about the darkness. Her eyes do not flicker towards them, not with the echo of music rolling between her bones like a wave. Over and over again it froths and turns to riptide. Behind her almost-smile her teeth ache to lay themselves at his pulse and pull out the music, and blood, and innocence. They ache to know the wonder of of poetry and brashness (and they ache to tear it from his heart).
“I am not yours to name.” Her warning is whispered, nothing more than another sigh of a blade in a spring wind. It's almost sweetened with the last traces of dreaming slumber. Almost.
She quivers; she tries to bury the ache of her teeth and the crash of her violence. In the back of her mind she tells herself that Ipomoea loves song, that he surely does not love it in the way she loves the iron, and acid, and blackness. He does not hunger for it. But when she says, “sing.”, the want is still in her voice no matter how deep she tries to buries it.
@Oliver
