There are a million confessions lingering in the belly of the cave. Each is tucked away in the bones of the shops with their gaping jaw-doors and their windows glittering like eyes in the face of a corpse. Thana can read them all. To her they whisper of suffering, and of dead wishes in fire bellies gone cold, and about monsters who wear upon their brows the false forest crowns of behemoths.
She walks with certainty through the whispering jaw-doors and the stones that tremble beneath her hooves like insects instead of stones. Magic follows in her shadow and each stone flips belly up like a dead fish flopping in want of air as she passes over them. And her eyes do not look down to linger on the belly-up things or on the shop wailing for salvation somewhere past her shoulder.
The only place she looks is ahead, towards the castle, where she can feel the city begging her for something her magic understands more than she does.
Perhaps it is why her eyes pass over Morrigan at first as nothing more than another sort of secret waiting to be unmade with shining eyes and door-gaping jaws. Her stride does not pause, or linger, or do more than fall heavy as the eyelids in the cavern crown, when the mare bellows toward her. And when she turns her head, slowly (so slowly that she must be unnatural), she almost regrets that it is to the mare with her empty threats and a heart roaring in her painted chest.
Thana smiles at the sound of her brashness as much as her magic starts to froth with hungry spit at the lingering scent of soot. Light gathers in her horn when she tilts her head like a hawk instead of a unicorn. Behind them every string holding the glass orbs in the window frays and turns to dust. The wailing store stutters at the sound of them falling (and maybe at the glimmering that shifts over Thana’s eyes when she looks at the shards of glass that have fallen point up).
Once more her stride does not falter as she moves past the mare, because to stop here in the city with her spitting magic frothing in her belly means death. “You are still hunted instead of hunter if you cannot find a mere girl.” The walls echo her voice back to the raging mare as if each syllable and sound of it is too heavy to hold between all the sorrowful wood and bones. Thana smiles as a monster in winter does at the echoing chime.
She smiles and does not look back at those gleaming glass shards across the jaw-door. Her hooves continue to fall like distant thunder, distant war on a horizon mere horses do not know the name of.
Thana does not stop because the demands of the hunted are nothing more than whippoorwills in the dark ferociousness of her storm.
@Morrighan
