Thana, who is always on the noose curl of being monster or blackness, needs so little to set her to swinging. Sometimes it takes no more than a tendril of smoke slipping down her throat like fermented fruit. Sometimes it takes more than that: a warcry, a gaze that settles too long upon her own, a whisper of wolf tongue and tooth upon the air.
And sometimes Thana just wants to swing, and swing, and swing.
She’s swinging now when Morrighan gathers her own pyre against her skin and lifts her gaze to Thana as if she’s not the Eldritch horror in the wolf pack. Her hooves are hanging over the blackness at the bottom of the noose and she tucks her knees to her chest in preparation for the leap into the darkness (she does not fall, she never falls).
“What need do I have of girls, mare?” Thana leaps with a smile until it’s blackness and smoke pouring in through the cracks of her snarling teeth. Her tailblade comes to rest beside her shoulder and the sickle curl of it shines like the eyes of a predator in the moonlight. A crow cries somewhere in the darkness of her magic and a dragon answers back in a trill muted by the sickness in his throat. And it’s not a unicorn, or a regent, or a thing made that steps closer towards the mare and all her holy, righteous fire.
It’s a monster of the Rift, an eye come down from the stone ceiling, a horror unfurled from the belly of a unicorn, that steps close enough to feel her hair singe in the heat. The horror wants to laugh, the eye wants to rupture, and the monster wants to lay her teeth against a throat of fire until she transforms to dragon.
“You are mistaken if you think the agony of burning will keep your heart free from the tip of my horn.” In the monster’s mouth her teeth spit and froth disease with each syllable of language. She inhales the smoke and embers moving about her head like flies. With a sigh they go down smooth as glass shards
Eligos, just Eligos, steps out from the shadows and lays his eyes upon the wolf. The dust at his feet trembles and becomes a pack of hounds with seven eyes and seven mouths upon each of their heads. He is no forest creature trained to come at a call of smoke. He is no tame thing at all.
The horror inhales again and when she speaks again it’s with smoke spiraling outward from her teeth. “And if you do not move I will not relent until you are dead or we are dead.” With a smile she waits, because this game is one she knows well. Eligos steps closer to the wolf and his pack of hounds with seven eyes, and seven mouths, on their seven heads spit dust to the ground when snarl.
They have played this game many, many times. And they never lost and never relented.
@Morrighan
