Thana has not often paused to wonder at the things that live beneath a canopy. There has always been the wild in her, the instinct to hunt and pull the world apart. There had been moments of death, of aching, of flesh and bone and all the things caught between it. Even when she looked at Asterion once, with light dripping from her horn, there had only been the ache to pull him apart bit by bit and send all the pieces of him home.
But this,
This,
This kiss between them that lives more in a dying flower than in their flesh makes her wonder. The wild in her blooms like a flower given sun because a great oak tree has died. It grows teeth, and claws, and it wants something more than flesh. It wants a hundred different things that spiral in Thana like disease, a hundred things she does not know how to name. This is the first time she has ever felt what might be a wanting of her own, a want that has nothing do with death, or war, or hunting.
What she wants has to do with fire and ice. And maybe there will be death still, because she cannot become something else (even for him, she cannot), but when a petal of the flower caught between them turns to rot even as one turns to seed Thana starts to think that there can be life too. Life in the fire and the ice, where she can burn hot as a war and her magic slumber.
When she catches the flower between her teeth and tucks it away on her tongue it dies. But the flavor, oh the flavor. She's about to tell him of it and braid his mane with the remnants of seeds caught between her teeth and tongue. She's about to tell Ipomoea of all the things she wants to learn about him-- how to live, how to love a forest instead of consume it, how to love, how to love, how to love. All the words she's never learned how to form are in her eyes when she looks at him. Each word is a flash of a constellation, of magic rotten and broken, of Thana who sometimes wants to only be a mortal thing.
But the words never come.
There is a crack in the forest, the subtle sound of hoof and loam, and everything in her forgets all about fire and ice. Thana becomes death (it is the only thing that comes easy to her, in the end there is death and nothing else for her). Her horn swivels at the sound and her eyes mark the movement of horn above the small copses around them. Part of her wants to call out, to run after the horse passing by them until she can make out the exact way their bones move beneath mortal flesh (until they have been hunted, to the ends of the world, hunted).
Were it not for the taste of seed and rot on her tongue, where it not for Ipomoea and the dull edges of her hunger that want to learn how to burn, she would remain death for the rest of the day. Instead, because she still wants to braid seeds and ice into his mane like an arcane poem, Thana takes a bit of his mane in her teeth.
And then she starts to pull him into the darkest parts of the woods like the savage, selfish, monster she is.
@ipomoea @Llewelyn
