And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
If Thana has ever thought she felt pride before at the sight of her daughter, she was wrong. Whatever feeling she had felt then is nothing to the feeling blooming electric across her black, rotten soul. It feels like one of Ipomoea’s flowers reaching for the sun in the dead of winter, a spot of bloody color in the middle of a colorless tundra.
When Isolt runs the elk through Thana’s heart leaps in her chest in two different songs. She can feel the holy hallelujah of a unicorn as she learns just how her horn was made to work. And she can feel the death-knell of the elk as he falls to his knees. She can feel how his heart, how her heart, races faster than it ever has before. This is not the feral rush of a joyous heart, but one of something so much deeper that there is no word in the language of horses to understand it.
But unicorns know it, and can hear it, when they run their horns together like blades instead of crowns.
And she’s singing that word over and over again (in bellows and snarls) when her daughter carries the elk’s horn to her. Her heart is blooming like a garden with the feeling she has almost learned to name in language when she watches gore puddle in the hollow of Isolt’s eye. Thana’s touch, as she dips her lips into that blood and drags a line from Isolt’s horn to her lips, is the gentlest one she has given anyone outside Ipomoea. There is no religion in Thana’s touch, only arcane knowledge given to all things made instead of born.
She does not need to know if Isolt understands when she scrapes their horns together. Nothing made by Thana would not understand.
Her something-more-than-pride rises when she pulls away as Eligos joins them again with his lips bloody from the other elk. Tonight, in the mad moon forest, his eyes do not linger on Thana but on Isolt with her grotesque prize at their feet. He lifts his head up to howl loud enough that Thana’s ears ring with the sound. The note ends almost as soon as it starts and his eyes are more molten than gold when he looks at Isolt eye to eye.
When Eligos, the monster made from sand soaked in blood, bows at the feet of unicorns it is not Isolt that is he pledging loyalty to but her violence.
Thana does not pause long enough to smile at the bowing Eligos when she says, “and now you understand.” There is still no smile on her lips, only the wet shine of blood in the moonlight when she lifts her nose back towards home and Ipomoea.
And like before Thana does not look to see if Isolt follows as she lets her stride eat, and eat, and eat of the mad moonlit forest.
@Isolt
