The island had been as cruel to Thana as she to it.
For every mile of it she consumed there had been an inch taken from her flesh. But her pain had been nothing in the face of the hunger of a made thing, of a magic thing, of a thing made to devour every pound of broken magic in the world. And so she had eaten of the island, and drank of the star-blood river, and tasted of the innards of a monster-god.
Her belly is still full of it and her magic still bloated with the ichor of a king’s stomach. There is salt-water in her veins, so much that it stings as it pools in all the wounds running map-line and rune-like across her skin. A burn pulls against her shoulder, smoldering even after a week of cold embers. Lines from sharp lapis stone run in grids across her ribcage. Even her eyes, normally so full of furious lilac, are as pale and faded as the first twilight hour.
But Thana, as she walks through the castle, feels like something has settled in her for the first time. There is no ache but that of exhaustion. Her belly does not snarl in hunger. Her horn does not sing like a whip-o-will in a storm. Thunder does not live between her teeth and her heart is only a steady lub-dub in her chest instead of a snarling, haunting timbre.
Every ounce of her magic, her furious beast of magic that lives between her heart and soul, is nothing more than a quiet stone in her chest. There is no inferno that makes her feel like she must roar, and roar, and roar loud enough to shake down the stars just so that she might get a moment of silence.
Thana is--
Just Thana. Just Thana in a way that she has never been before.
Thana who loves Ipomoea. Thana who is regent in a city full of gardens. Thana who has two daughters who must only live with a sliver of the hunger that makes up every cell of her body. Thana who is walking into her room, into their room, across a threshold as golden with mossy growth as it is black with decay.
It is better, she thinks, in the quiet.
Then, it is better to be empty than to kill another one of his flowers.
And when she curls up in their bed of silk, and tucks her horn to her bloody knees, there is not a single thread in the drapes that fades and all the bright flowers stay bright as her eyelids flutter closed. Had she been able to think anything in the silence of her dead hunger it would have been this is better, over and over again like a poem of love she had never understood.
@Ipomoea
