All it takes is a taste, a single drop of life and fire mixed, for the cavern to become a graveyard in her mind. Gone is the impression of stores around them, where they lingered out the outskirts of Thana’s thoughts. The screaming in the distance is nothing more than some horrendous hound baying in the center of the city. The weeping and wailing becomes laments for all the things she’ll never allow Morrighan to be again.
Enough, the mare says when Thana tries to dig her bones free from the jail of her painted skin.
Thana does not answer because her mouth is too full of blood and fire to shape any sound but hunger. But every black drop of her magic says, in a sonnet racing through her bones, nothing will ever be enough. And it will not.
Perhaps she is too lost to the hunger to feel the push of the mare as she shakes free from the imploding violence of a star. Perhaps she is too lost in that taste of gore to hear the snarl of Eligos as he makes to follow the wolf when she free. In her blood her magic, her wrath, bellows and brays and begs her to ignore the feel of char crusting her mangled skin.
And at first Thana’s heart leaps in her chest with the desperate urge to follow the mare to the ends of this earth if she means finishing the war she did not start (and she will not end it but consume it). Eligos presses his nose to the burns on her shoulder, hard enough that a unicorn who is not Thana might have sobbed. In his mouth, when he snarls, she can taste the echo of blood and forest in the air.
Morrighan and her wolf can run, and careen through the city like slivers of wind until they find the child they lost. They can run, and run, and run, until the horizon swallows them up and spits out birds to soar further away than that.
Thana follows them as they head towards the center of the city. The tail of blood rots and turns to black mold when her shadows falls across it. And Thana does not run, does not need to run, for it seems every eye in the city that sits outside a skull walks with her.
Running will not save them now-- nothing will.
@Morrighan
