And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
He settles her hunger and pours it out across the dirt until there is only a cup full of it at the bottom of her heart. It almost makes her bones feel full of marrow instead of rot, and magic, and black-ore. Eligos turns to go, his own hunger only fed instead of filled, and his footsteps are near-silent on the grass as he dissolves into the shadows.
Thana wonders what it would feel like, to twist and mold her form into a hundred different emotions besides this coldness on her lips. She wonders if her heart would learn to sing and hum instead of scream. And she wonders what it might feel like to take a seed between her teeth and taste something other than sulfur.
Death pours out from her now in a wave of wilting grass and lichen as she turns to lead the stallion deeper into the forest. She wishes it was light, silver and sweet instead of this black bitterness. Perhaps the waters that made her own poured sorrow and hunger in and kept the happiness (and kindness, and love) for themselves. “Someday you will have to tell me about your travels.” She says the words and her eyes beg him, not today, not today, not today. Not now with this almost settled thing in her still counting the hard vertebrae beneath his skin as she moves to lead him into the dark, wanting forest.
“I do live here.” But she does not clarify if it's castle or thicket that holds her tight each time she dreams when her gaze snags on a golden sapling as they walk. And she does not offer that she stays because the king asked it of her (still she doesn't understand why, not when his flowers die each time she kisses them). But something in the way her steps quicken to a trot, suggests that shes racing now towards whatever it is that she calls home.
Ahead the library breaks up the pathway, the door gleaming as brightly as the trees woven together above it. The sight of it sets her cup of hunger to over-flowing. She does not reach for the door as she stops and gestures Willfur to keep going. She's already discovered that any book, or table, she touches starts to mold and disintegrate into dust.
Something like a smile (one full of teeth instead of joy) creases her lips at the corners. “You will like the gardens more than the castle.” Thana does not say that he reminds her of Ipomoea who talks to his flowers, or that she can picture him in a bed of foliage just as easy as she can picture the bones slumbering in woven patterns below the first. She only lets her smile flicker and fade like the quick-death of a star, and she only lets her hooves carry her away from the library that will not welcome her inside.
But what she does say over her shoulder is, “find me in the city when you turn from the books to the flowers,” because it has been too long since her hunger poured out on the ground instead of flooding her soul.
@Willfur
