Her hunger only continues to grow like holly rooted in the iron blood painting a blush upon her cheekbones. Where it should be bloated and slacked there is only hollowness and the ever wanting ache of her bones. Eligos feels it too, the way his stomach trembles and roars like a trapped god begging freedom. And together they turn, with their hungry eyes, looking to the trail of poppies and thorns weaving like a golden trail through the forest.
Each step through the forest feels like a mile and each root trembling down to dust feels like a bone beneath her hooves. The darkness stretches long and low around her like horizons racing out through the night for the unknown. Moss clings to her nose when she drags her lips across a tree marked with an antler scar. This feels like hunting, following the trail of Ipomoea with hunger roiling in her soul like a riptide.
Leaves bloom fresh and new and sparking above her head before they fold down their edges like teardrops. Butterflies and moths fly above her head in lazy crown shaped circles. She can taste their wing-dust on her lips as she tastes away the last of the blood. The flavor only feeds the riptide hunger. Thana knows she should turn back and take this violence rolling far from him. She knows.
Still she walks with her hungry eyes, and Eligos's hungry snarling, with her heart endlessly telling her to turn back, turn back, turn back.
And yet when she sees him, half in the river like a thing risen from the black bottom, all her bones beg beneath the sudden singing howl of her hungry, bottomless heart. Thana listens now. She is helpless to it, because she can still see the shine of blood blooming across his skin like petals of ruby flowers reaching for the sun. It cracks open another jagged line racing down her heart in lighting bolts. It burns, and stings, and sets the hair on her spine to lifting.
Her body still moves like a weapon when she goes to him in the water. And her heart still roars like a monster in her chest as she counts the pulses of his heart like a dreamer might count the flickering poetry of a constellation. Every inch of her skin feels like a dead-thing as she presses it to his-- a bit of rot and mold creeping up a flower like broken drops of rain that have forgotten how to crave soot, and stone, and coldness.
But her heart sings like a angel's cry, as she gently presses her teeth against his spine, and it beats to the melody of mine, mine, mine.
@Ipomoea
