Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Even in the thick silver mist, Thana does not find the way to the pass by the glare of dull firelight or the soft-white light of stung up lights. The path is still outlined in char, young trees, and the memory of bones buried in the almost hard dirt beneath her hooves. All the suffering here has a weight to it, despite the fireworks exploding above her and the cheerful glow.
Thana can only see the memory of this place, the nightmare of it that the animals surely still see when they lay down to sleep. Beneath her hooves the resting bones quiver, drawn perhaps to the fury of her magic (or maybe it's the tenseness of her form, the way the air around her is a weighed thing and all the weighted creatures have always carried with them destruction). The tip of her tail whispers to them, dragging its long lines in the dirt; it promises all the violence they have already known, already suffered, already failed to survive.
The gloaming parts around the archway and the silver mist folds back against the gray stone and the glimmer of stained glass. Some part of Thana can see the beauty in it, the way it's open to the wind and the press of bodies moving through it like a flock of prey animals. But she can see the violence in it too, the way the trees are not tall enough to crown the peak of it.
It would be simpler, she thinks to keep the path open, to tuck the horror of their history into the dirt and soil where nature can reign supreme (it will in the end, it always does).
Where others move through, their eyes glazed in wonder and alight with the shine of fireworks, Thana only watches the darkness on the edge of it. There Eligos is walking, between the mountain lines and the nocturnal snow griffins who have shed off their hibernation at the sound of the explosives and cheering. It seems as if that darkness, trapped on the outside of this cacophony of light and sound is only waiting.
And so Thana waits with it.
