Break in the sun
Until the sun breaks down,
Until the sun breaks down,
She did not ask the children's names, only watched them with her heavy gaze like a lion might watch sparrows dancing around the edges of it's kill. They received no questions from her, only a bit of coin passed strangely with her teeth as if she's never learned how to exists in the world of mortals things born, and raised, and loved. And she did not answer any of theirs as the painted her in glittering swirls of silver and gold.
“It tells the story of the first hallowed one who braved the cusp.” The youngest of the orphans told her, hardly pausing to speak as she painted billowing clouds upon her blood-red cheek.
“Everyone knows the story.” The oldest of them whispered as she braided pearls and silvered acorns and leaves into Thana's mane. Perhaps she needed to gather the courage to braid them into the hair hiding a blade from the sight, as she started to whisper the story that everyone was supposed to know only to fill the silence...
It's the story that pools in the places between her heartbeats and her hoof-steps. It races in the streaks of whiteness breaking up the darkness each time she blinks slower than a living thing should. And it lives in each chiming echo of pearl and silver-dipped acorn as her braid tangle together as she walks though the too-thick crowds and the wilting grasses holding out against the cooling nights.
She wonders how like the hollowed one she is, a thing full of aching and hunger with teeth too rotten to eat a thing. Or if she the wolf in the story, dragging at any bit of spectral flesh as it tries to carry the hollowed one back to the underneath?
Or is she neither because this world is not her own?
And yet.
Yet.
When she sees him, soft and gilded in fire-light, Thana wants to howl to the moon, and all the things the children said are living in the air tonight. She wants to beg, and bellow, and stitch it into the darkness of her decay, just this one thing. And when she presses her shoulder to his, and drags her silver and gold between their skin only so that the story might live like a stain between them, she whispers only this one to all the aching places living like weeds in the darkness between her heart and her soul.
Thana smiles against his neck, as much as a monster like her can, and she presses the soft curl of her side against his (as if her flesh is saying, just this one, too). Firelight pools in her horn gilding it into a weapon against the darkness instead of one for it. Her teeth drag lines in his neck as she pulls away.
Let this one be mine.
Her lips are too hard against his cheek to be called a kiss as she presses them there before moving so they are only touching side to side (protecting that one secret that belongs to them alone). “Have you discovered the other world they are all whispering about?” Because it has always lived in her like a black-snaked waiting in the core of her.
But tonight, tonight she's drowning it in a sea of howling, and bellowing, and braying.
And she wonders if he can see it too, waiting there like a sickle moon beneath the eclipse of him.
<3 | @Ipomoea
"Speaking."
"Speaking."
