Thana remembers how it felt to dance, and sway, and swallow the shine of winter spectral lights. She remembers how to move her sinew in whispers of melody that chant almost sweetly of war, and chaos, and blood running across the loam in wide tracks of ruby.
She remembers. But she does not dance for him.
Her steps are for war-fields, and ice sharp enough to cut, and for moon-gold on silver nights. When she sways for him, for the melody of his song, there is a battle in the way her sinew slips over bone and the way her horn catches the light and turns it to billowing pools of star-shine. And perhaps there is a new song, an immortal song, in the way she howls a story without making a single sound. Perhaps it is only a tease of something deeper, something thick enough to drown him. Like a siren of death her magic, her brutality in the gardens, her blade tapping a heartbeat, tries to draw him closer, and closer, and closer.
The mortals around her head for slumber and their down-fat pillows and silks. Thana does not watch them go and she does not notice when the night billows heavy around her and the boy who was foolish enough to sing when she demanded it of him like a god. And when she offers her name, “Thana,” it is only so that he might have a name to sing when he lays down to pray.
And when the music stops suddenly she freezes like a god of war before a den of lions. Her horn sighs when she swings it to him and her eyes turn twilight dark as she watches the boldness shift across his face like a spring cloud. The pulse below his throat turns to numbers in her thoughts and the curl of his neck turns to gravestone. She paints him in death and glory even as she closes the distance between them in which the music (and her war-sway) has died.
Beneath her almost-smile her teeth grind together. Moonlight stretches out her shadow into another sentient dark-thing looking at the youthful perfection of his form. And she does not deny or confirm his question as she presses her lips to his shoulder.
Nor does she smile when she presses her teeth into his skin like a warning. “You should run.” The flat of her blade taps, taps, taps against the stone like a continuation of his dead song.
@Oliver
