The island is washing over her in broken waves of thick heat and predator song. Humidity is clinging to that swift pulse beating in the hollow of her cheeks and painting dark streaks of salt above her eyes like war paint. Thana is wearing the island like the skinned fur of a wolf and it's hung on her by the sharp, gray teeth in a mouth grown rigid and cold.
And oh! Oh wearing all the weight of dead time (it's not broken, she knows it's dead) feels like home. Each step she takes is lighter than the last, until she's moving like a blood-red lion through the jungle. Death, as always, is walking with her. Roots are dying all around her in black moons of rot, and leaves are drying up and blowing away in the weighted wind. When the canopy thickens and swallows up the last light of the sky, she only tells herself that she's walking with the night instead of rot.
Ahead a bird calls and she can hear the teeth in the sound of it. The leaves this deep in are growing sharper, like thorns blooming from branches and calling themselves flowers. When they get too thick to run through she loops her blade above her head and cuts them all down with one viper-quick slash of her tail. Thana almost wonders if the jungle can her the teeth in the sound of her too, or if it can only hear the way each cell of her body is turning thin and sickle weak.
Where is not for the white constellations of fireflies in the darkness she would have run right by the stallion at the water. She might not have looked at his tines of bone, or the wings at his side, and thought of a hundred ways to fight against them. Nor would she have paused, one hoof in the air like a lion who has just been startled by a doe.
But she can see him in the light of the insects and so she lowers her hoof and walks through the cloud of brightness. Each firefly dies the moment it touches her skin, until she's ringed with blackness and the rest of the world is lined with starlight. Some buried part of Thana laments the loss of the light and the sweet hum of frail wings dancing in the air. The larger part of her, that is still lined with humidity and wildness, knows that there is nothing to do for those withering, lovely insects.
And she knows when she tilts her head towards him the air still sounds like teeth moving through her carved out horn. It is the only sound she makes when she watches him and stays as still as a stone at the bottom of the deep, dark sea.
Thana, like the island, is waiting.
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