Tame things, even tame things with magic in their blood, will always fight as things born to be mere shards of an army fight. There is discord in their very creation, cells dividing over and over again as they collide and race towards death. Even the songs of their hearts, stumbling in their chests with love, and fear, and a hundred other emotions she can only name a few of, are made to be fleeting as their bones.
Immortality, and magic, cannot take the tameness from them.
But Thana can, and will, and she is made to rejoice in the devouring of it.
The death in her marrow, the magic created to devour the things that bend to law and crown, is rejoicing now. She had expected the mare to move, to step aside as a fawn steps into the forest at the first rumble of the thunder. And the mare, this mockery of a savage thing, is a frail fawn in the reflection of all the true savagery of death, of Thana. .
Eligos does not waiver from his path towards the wolf’s throat as fire returns his pack to dust that waters the stone with hate enough to raise another army (soon, soon, soon). His own tail is singed in the fire-ball, but he (with one lone seven-eyed creature at his side) does not pause to lament the loss of fur and scale. The wrath in his blood, his hunger that is gaping and hollow enough to devour almost as much as Thana, is too furious and molten to stop now.
He is too impatient to even snarl as he leaps for the jugular of the wolf. His mouth waters for the forests and mountains that surely live in the flavor of the wolf. For too long he has satiated himself on stags, and rabbits, and foxes. It ends, he thinks in images as all monsters do (a rib cage open to catch the moonlight, a tongue lolling on a emerald carpet in the center of the city), now.
And Thana answers him with images, for she too thinks as monsters do: a necklace running down the star-blood river like a log caught in a current, a spine hung from a lamp-post like a garland of beads and holly berries, a knee glimmering in the eye-light like a fat ruby.
All those thoughts, all those images, push her through the sting of fire as it runs along her shoulder blade when she dodges. The smoke of her singed skin spirals into her nose, her lungs, and it is nothing more than another reason to feast, another drop of hunger in the abyss of her. Thana snarls where Eligos does not. She dissolves down, down, down, into a tangle of rotten magic, and flesh made, and blood black and thick as oil.
And then, like a star dying, Thana implodes not into light but into a violence so terrible that to call it violence is to call a garnet a river-stone.
She does not try to bite, and kick, but to devour. Her teeth do not try to wound but to tear asunder. Thana does not care for victory. All she wants is the unmaking of the fire, of the cells colliding inside Morrighan that make her a thing too tame to survive. The skin on her shoulder aches in a way that screams instead of bellows and Thana wants to cool it in blood instead of water.
And so, as a true savage thing does, Thana settles down into the agony of the unmaking of a mare with a determination that would make any shard of an army weep to behold it.
@Morrighan
