She is awoken in the middle of the night by dream.
When she awakes it is with a jolt, like lighting rushing through all the hollow wanting parts of her soul. There is sweat beneath the snow on her brow. Below that there is the reflection of a bear with chrysalis hanging where eyes should be. Thana blinks back the sweat, snow and reflection. There had been words, something the bear was saying, but the meaning of them hasn't followed her to this realm even though her heart can still hear the sound of them.
By the time she shakes loose from slumber and the copse of pines, her aching soul feel a little less sharp. It starts to move the way it should, like a beast instead of a doe. And if there is still a shadow in her eyes, a reflection of something caught between this world and the next (all bones, and pines, and ancient shadows) she does not know it. Although perhaps it is the reason the drifting lights do not follow her the way they follow the winter-doe and the thick-coated foxes. Perhaps they can see it in her eyes, that strangeness, that death, the way everything in her wake smolders and dissolves into dust.
Faires are not fools. Magic never is. Thana know this. But it still hurts to see the entire glen start to fold away from her.
That is until the girl emerges like a wraith from the snowy dunes. There is a memory in the holy glow of her that makes Thana think of home. She wonders if this light would be as warm on her tongue, as deep, as fierce, as the god-water. She wonders if she could drown in it. It's a hundred terrible thoughts she's thinking when the girl comes closer, wildness apparent in each of her steps. Thana freezes.
She knows this is not her wildness. This is the recklessness of the young and mortal, of girls who look at light and only wonder what magic it makes on their skin. It is not the wild of the hungry, of the wanting, of the hollow cracks at the edge of the stars. It is not something that wants only to be filled.
But--
Thana steps closer anyway and exhales against a glowing ball of light until the light dims to nothing but a pale echo of this girl's light. The snow moans under her hooves (a lament of sorts, of the dead-thing walking in its Eden) and she does not stop to listen to the sadness until she pauses to brush her nose against the girl's shoulder. She says nothing, only gives one soft sigh of air in the space between them, like they are not equines but two wolves in the middle of a glen.
And then Thana starts to dance.
It looks like war.
@vaeri
