When the monster-god dies, and water pours from every orifice of him, Thana feels only a spark of her hunger start to flicker and flame again. She is not settled as the whirlpool rips at her tail like a hurricane turned to sea. She is not content when the god falls from her horn and the water splashes into her eyes when he falls.
She is not content, or settled, or placated.
And if she had felt herself alive with a rabid sort of wrathfulness, it is nothing (nothing!) to how she feels with Asterion speaks to her with water dripping like bloody from his belly. Now, as she feels the water hurry and rush at her hocks, she settles into a universe of violence Novus had yet to discover.
The city is waking up (of course it is) but Thana has already risen to the apex of its sentience and cracked upon her jaw to devour more of it. That same risen part of her turns to the fallen thing caught between Asterion’s skin and smiles.
In another place she would have told him what lived curled between his heart and his soul, what sliver of rot sinks down, down, down closer to his soul each day. Any other time but this one she would have snarled and plucked it loose as it is the right of unicorns made to do. But around them the city is waking up in the flood waters and before them the monster-god is sinking like a stone. And Thana knows, with that unicorn’s knowing that she is not to run away, or turn away from it like he suggests.
She snarls and lifts her blood blade from the water to lay it against his throat. “Go Asterion. It is not your time yet.” Her teeth, below the words, gleam in the light of the water and the eye in the sky to promise that the time is soon, soon, soon, for him. If she is aching, and creeping closer to her own death, she does not know as lost as she is too the universe below her wrath.
Soon Thana will come for him and that blackness creeping towards his soul. Soon she will drain him dry of it.
But today is for the city waking up and so she turns her bloody body into the rising waters instead of away from them. Because when the city wakes up she will be there to meet it, and devour it, and sink it back into the world it came from.
And Thana needs no tide, no current, no sea to do it.
@Asterion
