Thana does not see the past, or the future, or this world in the glass corpses of the stars. For her there is only glass stained with black moss, and beasts with silver eyes peppering the darkness, and the thunderous cracking of those same corpses breaking into sharp shards at the force of her hooves as she runs. Each beast is following her with those silver eyes and their jagged jaws are open with dripping spit and roars that sound like come home, come home, come home, tangled with the thunder.
She turns, Eligos turns, and there is a gap jawed bear watching them with eyes pointing straight as a compass to the tip of her horn. They smile back with their own teeth flashing like caught and dead stars in the blackness of her lips. Their look is just as hungry, just as wanting, just as holy and full of grotesque glory.
They lift their head up and howl, and howl, and howl, just because there is no one here to tell them to be tame and be gentle. Here they are neither mother, or guardian, and there is no crown on their heads but the spiral bone of Thana’s horn that whispers death. They run, and snarl, and nip at the dead forms of stars because there is not a thing in this world to tell them no.
And if they are not home they do not realize it.
Together they come upon the mare, a blot of dead gold in their sea of black-glass and charred bones, with her head turned and straining to the corpse of a dead star. Thana smiles with curiosity. Eligos snarls with a hungering need. They step closer and their feet, even at a walk, are distant thunder.
There is no wind to whistle through her horn when she tilts her head like a wolf towards the mare. And there is no storm to deafen the cry of her tail-blade as she drags a war-field line across the dirt and glass. There is (as there always is) thunder in her throat when she inhales the smell of the sorrow.
Through her smile she whispers, “What is it that you see?” as if it’s not the death of this golden mare flashing across the back of her eyelids like ribbons of lightning. Like she sees beginnings across the mare’s perfect spine instead of endings.
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