It is fitting perhaps, that this bit of soot, and smoke, and decay, consumes her when there is still death and blood caught between the stars of her snarling lips. Or perhaps it is fitting that a king and his unicorn have all this black hunger tangling between their hearts where others have music. Or perhaps it only matters that there is this: art where she drags bloody water in patterns across his skin, grave-songs when the wind whistles through her horn as she traces the hollow crowns of his eyes, divinity when she growls instead of moans.
And perhaps this is the only almost-music they need, the only substance, the only blaze of heat to chase back the ghosts and the bones trailing in their wake like weeds eager for the thick loam of their hears.
Thana does not think of death, or hunger, or the iron sweet of the blood in her belly. She thinks of dissolving, of how she never knew that there was another way to dull the ache, and all the ways in which she is begging him to unmake her so that she might know how it feels to be the reaped instead of the reaper.
She does not think, oh she does not think, of the terrible things that will come from this. She does not know.
There are no promises on her lips, no holy poetry or romance. They are need and gore, death and life. They are beyond all the things that make other hearts sing and settle down to sleep. She is storm-violence to water his roots, hurricane winds to make art of his sands, frost beneath the dew-gold sun.
Every terrible black pit of her heart is his. Does anything matter beyond that?
When he drags her into the water (like a shark, like a snake, like of wolf), she only snarls that bit of music that says yes, yes, yes like a lion at the throat of a lamb. She does not thrash, not when he lays his teeth and weight against her. Thana submits as a monster does-- with teeth, and furious passion, and blood. Her submission tastes like sugar, and algae, and the fermented flowers of his skin.
And she goes down, down, down in the water fat with lotus and mold.
But her soul, oh her viscous soul, rises up in a bright-white pillar of fire.
@Ipomoea
