Thana, in the time it takes for her to blink, has catalogued each muscle by the order in which she would unstring them. She has divided the chambers of the pegasus’s heart into seeds that she might scatter to the wind. Each breath, each flicker of a feather in a wing, each dragon scale glimmering like obsidian waiting to be mined, each vertebrae from which she might string together a necklace for Isolt, each tendon waiting to be turned to music: Thana has counted them all, imagined the flavor of them all and watched an eon rush through the pegasus’s rib cage like she was more canyon than flesh, and bone, and sea.
“I would devour you,” she answers in the time it takes for her to blink, “from the inside out”. Each word is a crack of bird-wing as her tail turns it into less than a memory of flight.
Eligos fills her thoughts with an image of a shark beached on the shore and the way it had both brined and rotted in the sun. And on her tongue, as she shifts her gaze to watch him lift a bloody snarl from the belly of a vulture, is not the taste of the desert but of fat salted and brined by the sea.
When the mare rips a vulture from the sky Thana does not smile at the sight of her hunger (what wendigo smiles at a bear with a hare in its mouth?). She only lifts her head away, as a wendigo would, to watch the vultures screech and flee the unappeased wrath of her vengeance.
There is no where, her look tells them, that I will not annihilate each one of you.
And that look is still in her violet eyes when she turns back to the dark mare with her darker dragon. It’s in her voice when she says, not like a promise but a prayer, “They took something that was not theirs to devour.” But her smile, as she steps towards Eligos waiting with his paw on the throat of a frantic vulture, is all prayer and promise.
@Lucinda
