There is a beauty (or at least Thana calls it beauty) to the savagery of the desert. Each dune rises around her like an organ of the earth laid bare for the crows and the vultures. The horizon waivers frail and paper-thin all around her until there is nothing but sand, and sky, and the sound of carrion wings curling tornado wide above her head. Something in her heart, her never-full heart, leaps at the brutality around her. She thinks, just before the mare lands before her, that there is nothing in this place that does not belong to death, and decay, and suffering.
And perhaps it is more of a knowing than a thinking when she turns her gaze, her fat with the desert gaze, to the pegasus and her dragon. Her look turns to a smile devoid of teeth but with all the hunger of them. “We could be.” Together both Thana and Eligos turn to watch the dragon circling above like another carrion bird searching for a corpse to feast on.
But corpses do not tilt their horns towards a pegasus that smells like the sulfur tide, and corpses do not feel the gravitational pull of hunger in their bellies as a want sparks to need. Corpses do not cleave lines in themselves to draw the scavengers closer, and closer, like fish to a net. Corpses do not let the smile in their eyes unfold to a silent baring of teeth and wrath.
Corpses do not feast.
The vultures swoop in, some slow enough that Thana can almost feel the weight of their feast the night before, towards them. Her need sparks into something else, something deeper and more hollow than need. It feels like a blackhole has opened up in the center of her when Eligos leaps up to drag a carrion bird to the ground.
“Would that make you a vulture?” The black hole in her belly whispers the words like a mere flash of violence that lives no longer than the time it takes a star to die. And she does not look to Eligos who makes no sound but devastation as he feasts on the first vulture to fall.
Even when her tailblade cleaves a wing from a vulture she does not look away from the black mare and her low-tide warning.
@Lucinda
