Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Had he been anyone else, anything else, careening towards her between the star-bones Thana would have cleaved a path between his skin and heart. The instinct is there still. It’s in the whine of her tail as she drags it across the mirrors to hang above her hip. It’s in the violent violet flash of wrath in her gaze that flickers out as quickly as the thunder of her steps when she stills.
And it’s in the way she strains towards him instead of away when she drinks his fear straight from his lungs.
Had he been anyone else there would have been a feast.
But she only smiles at Wilfur in the wake of her flashing wrath (and there are too many teeth in the look as there always is). Her ribcage curls around the outline of him as he stops, as a wolf coddles a cub when the first bear comes to call. Beneath her own skin her heart stumbles and stutters to match the melody of his own (drum beats, and fear, and the aftermath of war). Her reflection joins his own between the ribbons of dust and mold racing over the mirrors. The blade on her tail settles with a pale echo of thunder as she rests her horn across his brow in a dangerously gentle touch.
“Walk with me.” She says. The thunder is still riding hard in her bones still itching with instinct. And when she passes him, shoulder to shoulder as lions, her heart stumbles and stutters again into a fresh echo of a battlefield. There is no fear in the sound of it, only clash and clamor and ruin. Mold and rot follow her like footprints across the star-bones.
Eligos follows, nose tucked to her hip, as any faithful monster might. He wails against the tether of his unicorn as his hungry, molten gaze follows the spines of them as they walk. Thana does not need to remind him of the cost of hunger, not when she drags her nose across a mirror and sets it to a flashing chaos of memory.
Flash. A winged thing falling.
Flash. Harpies soaring towards them over a sea black as ink.
Flash. Death. Flash. Blackness. Flash. Nothing.
“This is what happens after a galaxy of stars dies still full of wishes.” Her tail whines across the pathway rising up in glimmering agony around them. An eon lives in her gaze, a world full of magic too broken to follow what laws it was made to obey. There is a knowing too, as gods know, when she turns to follow the line of his flank that still rises and falls quicker than her own.
Thana’s smile does not waiver. “Is it only your reflection that you see?” Above that unwavering smile, her eyes turn feral with the instinct she has not yet forgotten.
Eligos steps closer and rests his nose against the apex of her ribcage.
