There is a moment, in which Thana wants to forget all the death trapped and purring in her skin. She wants to step outside herself. Maybe then she could become a crow, perching inside walls instead of underneath dead, winter leaves. Or perhaps she could be nothing more than another horse, painting with ink.
But she's looking at the red ink someone's spilled across the table, and thinking that is she were to paint at all that's the only color her mind might understand. Deep down she knows she can be an artist too-- of war, of violence, of sinew and bone.
Tonight she wants to pretend that she's not scanning the walls for the something to cool all the black death in her stomach. The carpet is still turning gray under hooves, and the wooden table is turning black when she taps her blade against the leg of it. She's still killing everything she touches, and so when she brings some paper closer she chooses green, and yellow, and all the paints that are bright enough to sting when she looks at them too long.
“I'm Thana.” The paint splatters on her nose when she streaks it across the paper. A smile almost curls her lips, but that too dies the moment it touches her skin (as if all her nerve endings are black holes instead of electricity). Part of her wants to join the mare in talking until she can't hear anything in her own head, but each word dies too the moment it touches her tongue.
So she just dumps every bright color on her paper, until the edges of each color turns dark like dirt when it mixes. Her eyes sting to look at the paint and her heart aches a little in her hollow chest for the way she's created something so unlike everything inside her.
Thana doesn't take any of the mead, she's seen how horses change when they drink the stuff. And she knows, that if she looses herself, every horse in this room might become red paint across gray stone. “I call Terrastella home.” The words sound like storm of lies on her lips, black even though her lips are splattered yellow and green with paint.
The silence gathers in her eyes, like smoke, even though the hall is alive with sound, music and laughter. “What kind of tree are you painting?” She asks, like she hasn't already noticed the crack breaking the tree. The trunk of Corrdelia's tree looks like it's been cleaved in half by lighting.
Thana's tail blade brushes against her hocks like a reminder-- a reminder that's she lighting and not a tree full of bright leaves shining in the sunlight.
@Corrdelia
