And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
Madness lives in the moonlit forest tonight, gathering like twilight darks in the tangles of their shadows over the loam. Thana can feel it in the wind against her cheek, a kiss of ghost petal, a memory of her daughter’s touch before she’s gone chasing after the trail of blood leading them onward to the utopia of monsters. Had she known how to feel pride it would have risen against the surface of her skin like a touch to the insides instead of the outsides. Part of her wants to say, we have never been wolves, but language of the mortals has no home in the moonlit forest.
It never has.
Tonight the language in the silver is one of hoof and leaf, hunger and a desperation to live, live, live. There is language in the trees, in the drops of blood falling from the stomach of the desperate thing when it patters like rain against the pine needles. A story hangs in tomes of formless script where their shadows twist in and out of the thicket like snakes instead of unicorns. Each page, each poem written on the skin of the earth where it has been peeled back, creates a new memory, a fond one, in the tangled novel of Thana.
Her steps quicken her story to an apex, her horn the spiral tangle in the dark between one page and the next. Already she has forgotten the trail of the dying thing. Only when Eligos shares the taste of liver, and marrow, and horn coated in moss, does she remember that there had been two trails instead of one. Each of her steps only carries her after her daughter. She moves quick enough to trail but not quick enough to surpass-- tonight is not for the old monsters, the old masters of the moonlit madness.
Tonight is for the creation of new-gods, new-monsters, unicorns anointed by the feel of ribcage across their brows instead of crows.
Ahead the creature stumbles, an elk large and fearful enough to cause them harm as it struggles for survival. Thana watches as his antlers slips through the forest easier than it should even when his hooves scrape and claw for purchase in the spring mud. He cannot run as a predator runs. Large and terrible prey is still prey.
All prey, even this old prey-god of the forest, is destined to die at predator teeth of either monsters or death.
And they, the bloody unicorns in their forest of madness, are both.
The sickness she smells in his blood will only spread, and devour the herd until they are all dead. It is better, she thinks, that this one, this sick one, dies. Thana lifts back her head and howls, like wolf baying at the last desperate flight of her meal. But she does not leap after the stumbling elk, but rather she lies in wait to watch her daughter discover the terrible glory of the moon against her cheek and the blood between her teeth.
@Isolt
