Blood, as it always does, awakens something that has only ever pretended to sleep inside Thana. The ichor of the monster king feeds the hunger that is only like a Hydra. For each drop that slips, smooth as ice on a pond, down her throat a mile of hunger opens up. And her hunger is a horizon by the time the screams sound like anything at all to this thing that has awakened inside her body.
If this world, this pale and civilized world, had thought her monstrous they would have no name, no understanding, for the thing that bares her teeth at the scepter swinging towards her shoulder.
The tip of it, a lapis whittled down to blade, slips down her side and cuts a line across her from shoulder to hip. Her blood does not sing as it falls across the monster’s bloody knee sitting on the floor and his opiate seeds trying to burrow into the meat of them as it falls. The only sound Thana makes, the only sound her blood makes as it falls, is the sound of ruin creeping in tomes of rot and mold across the soiled floor.
Like a wave, a dark shadow of the coming tide, it pushes closer and closer to pool in rivers of decay around her hooves. It rises with the same brutality as her hunger, her wrath, her fresh-hate and vengeance. With it, in it, upon it, Thana pushes through the agony of her flayed skin to sink her horn into the stomach of the towering monster.
Eligos leaps upon the throne and goes for the throat, as all monsters born only from violence know do. His dust pack follows him, their tongues fat with rot and mold as they drag their mouths down the god’s legs. Their collective moaning (as they drink ichor down into their dirt bellies) sounds like another sea racing in from the center of the city.
The monster king screams his rage and swings his claws down towards the unicorn embedded into his center. All he can feel is pain, and a rage that cannot compare to Thana’s, and there is nothing left but survival for any of them. Thought has been devoured by reaction. He swings over and over again, so consumed by feeling that he cannot tell the movement is cleaving him in two upon the point of her horn.
Thana, now marked with maplines of blood and gore, smiles in the river of horror running down her face. To the death, that smile says in the same way it always does. With her, to her, it is always until death.
Until Thana.
@Asterion
