[P] light between shadow and soul,

[Thana]

Break in the sun
Until the sun breaks down,

There is a song in the meadow, notes twisted between the lights and the last-pollen motes of the season. It rings in her ears like the black-white sea, like monsters snarling in gemstone caves and harpies giving out coins for a memory. She can hear the notes of it, hear the softness, the way it's begging for there to be beauty in the shattering on the veil.

But Thana cannot understand. Even as their Regent, as their unicorn prowling the gates like a bear, as a mare who wakes up each morning on silken sheets surrounded by books she cannot read, Thana cannot grasp the meaning, the holiness, the religion of the song.

Still she tries, oh she tries, to learn it by tracing the curls of Ipomoea's form. She tries to catch it in the way his eyes grow both brighter and darker (like a twilight sky rising just for her) each time he looks at her.  When she turns to him her mouth feels full of her heart, of his heart, of the blood of a single doe. And she tucks it into his chest so that his words might fill her up and deafen the roaring black-magic of another world.

And if Thana had to choose how to be the dead-thing instead of the reaper, she would cry out for this bloated ache of her soul over and over again until she was nothing more than drops of dark blood in the cosmic waters.

“I do not think the world I came from could ever be this lovely.” Thana knows that it could never be. That world, that chasm of rot and wrong, does not hold in its cells the shape of Ipomoea. Her lungs flutter in her chest like two wolves as she inhales and exhales him, whispering their violent, viscous language to his heart where it hides beneath his skin.  

Inhale. Exhale. Again

“No.” She answers him and it feels like her teeth are leaking the blood of their heats when she pulls away to look at him. Or maybe it's only pearls falling from her teeth, pearls enough to choke her. The color of his lips turns more black than silver or gold when she presses her lips to his in the place where he's dusted with the painted story. It is better here, she thinks, than in the mouths of children.  “I do not remember it enough to miss it. But what would I be without it?” The veil, and their hearts, and the lights glimmer around them like funeral shrouds pretending to be bridal.

And she wonders if this thing between them would exist if she discovered a world without black-death and aching. Would would they be without the hunger?

Would they love as mortals do? Or would they still love as violently as two monsters in the wood do?

<3 | @Ipomoea
"Speaking."

SID | BERB