And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
Thana was not made to be a mother. In her bones there is no instinct but that to rend, and ruin, and break down the marrow of the world until there is nothing left but dust (and Ipomoea and sometimes her daughters). She does not feel concern when the stag turns with the frantic violence of hunted things in its gaze. The pride blooming sun, and star, hot does not flicker down into anything but a dim echo not of fear but of fury.
Her fury, her wrath, her instinct to rend and ruin, is not only for the stag and his desperate attack.
A true-made unicorn might have known better and Thana, who is true-made, feels that spark of rend, and ruin, and devour turn ember blue-red. It does not smolder in her chest but out of it when she lifts her head like the god of the mad forest to watch the stag cleave a line across her daughter’s cheek. The flat of her tail cracks against a pale dead-tree like a gong calling forth the eve of war.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Her tail sings the song of war far below Thana’s eyes that do not promise salvation or comfort for her daughter.
Isolt is not Ipomoea with flowers in his hair. She is not Ipomoea with wings fluttering like chains of hope at his ankles. Isolt is not a king on a throne of roses, and roots, and memories of a desert hidden in the deep of a garden.
Isolt is not Ipomoea and so Thana, terrible and made Thana, will not save her.
She watches the rage, the wrath, the dregs of her own rend and ruin, turn to more than embers in her daughter’s gaze. She watches the stag turn frantic and feral as a mortal caught in a rip-tide (and he doesn’t know that Isolt is his riptide yet, Thana can see the denial in the way he lowers his horns to attack again). She watches the silver dapple like the blood of the moon on the bare spots of the forest where it is still thick enough to reach. She watches an owl alight upon a branch with wonder at a feast a glimmer of diamond in his eyes.
She watches Isolt turn.
And she cracks her blade against the tree again as she watches a unicorn learn all the ways in which she will die or which she will consume, and rend, and ruin. Until, Thana thinks, there is only dust.
Until there is only us.
@Isolt
