Thana does not see a city. She does not see the shops, and the wonders, and the barnacles twisting themselves into a mockery of space. Her gaze does not linger on the crying walls or the screaming ones (although the sounds of them live in her chest like a tumor nested into the chambers of her heart).
The eyes in the wall, the apex of the rib-cage bridge, the wind no one else can feel but that she can see, all catch in her gaze like flies in a corpse. And Thana welcomes them in with a slack jaw and blood that coagulates instead of races.
Come closer, each whistle of that not-wind in her horn says. Come in, her teeth say as they grind against each other like whetstones and blades. And she does not blink, does not falter, does not pause, as she runs through the noose city like an arrow to the throat of it.
Eligos runs with her, shoulder to shoulder, and his body says nothing--- nothing at all. Death never does.
She feels that same nothing as the gemstones eyes in the door follow the shadow of their death when she passes through. The carpet withers like a forest laid flat at her hooves-- red, to brown, to black, to dust gathering in the mortar. Rooms gather their secrets close, like hens their eggs, as she passes by the chambers of them. The walls grow thick and fat with mold, and moss, and larva while she moves through the stone veins of the castles.
And if the palace is screaming a lament she does not hear it above the thump, thump, thump of a monster’s heart calling her to war.
Her own thump, thump, thumps back an answer. Yes, it bellows, yes.
The throne rises up before them as does the false-god with their throne of bones and their crown of trees. Thana smiles at their opalescent gaze in their opalescent brow-- one that does not compare to the incandescent and implacable wrath in her own. There is a mouth full of teeth in her look and nothing of kindness, or caution, or anything but a poem that she promises to carve into the legs sprouting from a false-god’s chest.
Outside the not-sun dies and the eyes blink.
Inside, in the cage of molded walls, Thana drags her horn against the throne-room archway.
@Asterion
