Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Willfur reminds her, in a way that nothing else has, of how ‘other’ she has been made to be. She can see the antithesis of her in every look he gives her, in every feeling pouring out his eyes like wrath and want pour from her own. Looking at him makes Thana want to remember how she was filled with aching for softness, how she lamented over each rotten root instead of rejoicing at it. But when he speaks, and his language wanders into a gray that she’ll never understand, she realizes that she has nothing of true softness left.
Even her love, her adoration, is as sharp as the twisted spire of her horn.
And so she does not try to shift, and settle, into the thing his eyes are asking her to be. Thana is still hard, still sharp, still cruel even when she raises her horn from his brow. Her tongue runs along the inside of her teeth, straining even as she steps away, for all the things she could have had with a step closer instead of away. Eligos snarls at her and turns away, furious but tame in the face of Thana’s silent command.
“It is a wise thing to ask a unicorn for mercy.” She says as he pulls away (and as she allows it). Eligos is already dissolved into the mirrors and Thana can hear the roar of his need echoing in her chest like thunder. The storm is still echoing in her chest when she lays her tail against a mirror again and says, “although it it wiser still to demand it and be certain that you cannot be denied.”
The tap, tap, tap of her tail echoes again as he talks of monsters, and monstering. It is the strangest thing, the most mortal thing, a horse has ever said to her. Thana, who has learned how not to devour each citizen coming to her for help (but to devour the thing worrying them), cannot help but smile at the softness she can see but never understand. On her the look is not done in half-measures of amusement but half-measures of cruelty. “You will never be a monster Willfur.” Her smile withers as she speaks, unaccustomed to remaining for very long.
When she nods her head at him there is nothing in the gesture but a farewell between blade and scabbard. “But when you want to learn how to defeat them I will teach you.” And Thana does not linger much longer when Eligos’s hunger turns from thunder to hurricane. She only lingers long enough to say, “And then you can demand your mercy of a unicorn instead of asking for it.” Her walk turns to a trot and then to a canter as all the hesitation of the hunt she had felt at the sight of him returns.
The island, the mirrors, the glass at her hooves, does not make a sound as the darkness swallows Thana back into the belly of it.
