TW: also some disturbing imagery
Killing has only awoken her hunger instead of feeding it. The drops of blood have all dissolved to dust in her belly and the rage only banked by the furious fire of passion is remembering how to eat. And as she follows Ipomoea to the cottage in the woods, it stretches and purrs like a thing waking up from the winter.
Perhaps it has never been awake before now-- before she stepped through the rotten grave-gardens, with the meek bleating fear of livestock, and the jars of organs purring for the bitter holiness in her gaze as they beg for her to look, look, look at them.
Perhaps it is only awake now because the mold, and the dust, and the skins draped across the furniture like silk all realize that for the first time (unlike all the others) their god has stepped across the threshold.
And their god smiles for the way they all tremble down to dust, and weep tears of sulfur at the sight of her. And her smile has teeth, and fury, and warfare dripping from it like spit, and blood, and a million different endings falling like rain. Their god brushes her shoulder against the wood, and the roots trailing down the walls, and the blood dusted across the walls like careless art, and she laughs as it all starts to pull apart, cell by cell until the walls are weeping sap as they start to fold towards her like sinners brought to heel.
Below it, above it, inside it all there is the smell of brine, and sea-rot, and tide-water. She remembers the taste of it as she swallows the air, and that awoken thing in her belly starts to clamor and screech and flap its black wings against the sky of her rib-cage. This is the smell of the of the feeding ocean, of the marshland as it slithers from freedom to land, and of her mother-and-father-water as it circled between this world and all the others like a snake without mouth or tail and only a belly that does not know how to bloat.
That black-winged beast smiles at the smell in the air, and it nickers like a wolf as it says, come home, come home, come home. And when Thana opens her jaws and starts to grind her teeth it says in the language of bone on bone and hunger upon hunger-- I am the way home.
When the beast comes, the shape-changer in a form that she did not care to learn (not until now, not until the walls started to curl like peeled off bark eager to kiss her skin), Thana does not feel anything but the steady thrum of a drumbeat heading into the belly of a battlefield. She does not do more than smile her look that says come home as the creature drips her water into the floor and looks at them with her mouth full of rooting teeth that have not learned yet all the ways in which they much come to heel at Thana's hooves like the weeping walls, and the roots, and the horror.
But then between the drip of blood, and salt, and rot, and sap that rotten mouth starts to shape the name Ipomoea. Her drumbeat heart turns to a bellow.
Eligos snarls from the doorway, the sound of it an echo of thunder that catches on the falling and weeping walls.
Thana snarls too. Her own is not thunder but promise freshly forged and still molten with the furious fire that has remembered there is still dead-bone to char and flesh to eat. In the sound her teeth ache to pull out the creature's bones through the gaping wound in her neck.
There is no surprise in the way she steps forward to block the thing pretending to be death. The movement is all threat, all promise that Thana will tear her apart organ by organ and hour by hour if the half-dead creature takes another step closer.
And the look in her eyes seems half prayer, half holy summons.
Come home. Come home.
@Ipomoea @
