All the lambs, in the last moment before the blade runs across their throat, start to discover the taste of rage. They discover it as only innocent things marked for the blackness do. Thana can, and has always been able to, see the flash of it in their eyes like a young sun that burns so hotly that it burns out in all the time it takes to blink. Had she known more than hunger, and need, and ache, and wrath as implacable as the moon, she might have wondered at the fury in a lamb's gaze.
But a blade has no need for wonder. A blade does not feel more than skin, and sinew, and blood gathering in the chips left from a million cuts. And so Thana, who really is more blade than unicorn, does not wonder at the terror below the brief and holy flash of hunger.
It’s the hunger of wrath and rage that marks a lamb for death. Only things made to die, only things waiting to die can look like that.
It’s not a waterfall that Thana has been waiting for the mare to hear. It’s not silence that whispered on the end of her blade as she dragged it in kisses across the mare. Even in the darkness, even in her darkness, there is no sound of silence.
Thana had been waiting for her to hear the sound of a hundred things dying all at once in the arching shadows of their bodies as they met. She had been waiting for the mare to hear the coo of rot, the holy lament of a mirror as it turns brittle, the bleat of a hundred lambs urging the golden mare to sing them a eulogy and call it a story.
Still Thana is not surprised when the mare’s terror takes her as a current takes a rotten leaf. She is not surprised when the terror pulls her away from what only a thing born could call a lesson.
And she is not surprised to feel a smile curl across her lips, and the echoing howl of Eligos in the distance, as she steps into the mirror after the mare and starts what will not be the second lesson but the last.
@
