Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
And the unicorn evils run them through;
The river, the wildest part of Delmuine with its slippery, jagged rocks and its banks that plunge into almost waterfalls, it not as wild as Thana. Perhaps it's obvious in the way little half-moon crescents of blood bloom like flowers where she steps among the current. Or perhaps it's only the way the coyotes and the deer lining the banks only pause to lift their heads at her, still as stone but for the quickening of their breathes.
Maybe it's only the way the river, chaotic and furious, only seems an extension of the darkness lingering in her gaze like a parasite instead of a look.
On either side of her the forest sits, heavy with blackness and a quietness bred from foreboding. Somewhere there are bones, and blood, and creatures hiding in their dens praying to be saved. And somewhere between all that darkness and bone are poachers whose breaths can be counted in hours instead of days. Her eyes drift to the shore, to Eligos who follows like a distant shadow caught in the current of her war-drum heart that races, and beats, and screams at a pace far too frantic for the steady stride of her legs through the river.
It's racing now, when a form peels back from the darkness lining the place where the forest and the shore meet. And it's bellowing the same low, low, low as a whippoorwill beating against a stone in a hurricane. Thana does not need to look at her reflection distorted in the current, to know that her horn glimmers like a polished sword when she turns it to the form coming towards her.
And she does not need to look down to feel the way the water around her starts to thicken with green algae, like the river has been still for an entire time, around her hooves. She can feel it, the grotesque magic of her making, leaking into the world like blood from a mortal wound. It feels like breathing, like singing, like humming a song only she can hear.
It feels. Oh it feels. Like being god.
Look, her form seems to say, from the tip of her glimmering horn to the stain of her hooves in the water, look. Thana does not try to hide it, that glimmer of holiness, of brutality, of everything that rots a world from the inside out, when she nickers to the horse coming closer.
And even if she wanted to tuck away the violence in her core, it would be as impossible as tearing the sun down from the sky. Only the moon can do it. Only time.
