The forest was deep, dark, and all things that could make an equine jump and exclaim “Oh, my!”
As Raglan picked his way over gnarled roots and damp hollows, he felt his heart skip with excitement. The Crow had heard of some poacher in Terrastella’s borders, taking refuge in the woods and slaughtering non-equines then leaving their massacred bodies to rot until they were found. Part of him wondered how long it would take for the monster (if thats really what it was) to start in on the fairer shades of hooved mammal.
A pleasurable shiver ran like an electric current beneath his skin, the fear rushing through and making him giddy. To be sure, the stallion was only tramping through the dim depths of the forest as a thrilling and coltish pastime, he had absolutely zero plan for confrontation if the Poacher decided to appear. Raglan guessed that he was strong enough to fend off most (maybe most) attackers; after all, time as a street urchin didn’t make for soft children, it made for bruised knuckles and bloody teeth. Yet, even with horns and wings and hooves, the Crow didn’t know just what he may have been up against, and that made both the excitement and the anxiety so much more intense.
Smiling like a madman, the mahogany stag ducked beneath a low hanging branch and paused at the sound of a twig cracking. He tilted an ear to his left, grin growing ever wider, as his muscles coiled and adrenaline-laced sweat began to dampen his coat about the withers and sides. Was this it? Had he stumbled upon the feared and fabled Poacher? Would he perish? Would the notorious creature let him escape?
He fought the half-hysterical giggle rising up in his throat like a wave and nearly choked on the effort.
”Ohshitohshitohshitohshit...” Came the nervous whisper, words rapid fire and breathy with anticipation.
The forest has always known Thana for what she was.
A lion in the thicket hunting hares with the same violence she might hunt a bear with. A shadow, the black reaper, moving beneath the boughs and sleeping cedars with all the silence (and none of the life) of the roots. From the pines rustling around her, to the bark peeling off the trees she lingers beneath, the forest has never tried to see Thana as anything but death.
The forest has never loved her, not in the way that it loves its king with flowers at his heels instead of silk. And yet, she moves through the damp ground where the snow has started to melt, protecting it. She protects it only because there is king that loves in the the same way she loves the thrill of fury, and wrath, and aching, beating out its boundless drumbeat of war. Her rib-cage echoes it like a cliff echoes the sea, like a canyon echoes the hungry vulture and the dying hare.
She's still listening to the song of the rustling forest, and her poison heartbeat, when she first hears him. There is no subtlety to his sound. He's all whispering feathers, heavy breaths, and blood roaring beneath skin in a begging scream to fall like rain. He is everything Thana is not (and maybe nothing a poacher is). So she makes no attempt to soothe his whispered words and his heaving lungs.
Thana makes no attempt to be anything but a predator emerging from a copse that cares nothing for her. There is the tilt of her horn, aimed for that place between his racing heart and his butterfly lungs, to suggest violence. Black rot rises like a vernal pool around her hooves where all the fallen leaves have turned belly up. Every inch of her makes a mockery of his noise and of the horns perched above his brow in a forgotten promise of danger.
Every inch of her, every blood-red inch, is a prayer no god has the courage to answer.
“Have you come to find death?” Thana's voice is soft, another pool of rot leaking out from the forest shadows. When she steps closer, her tail dragging silently through the decay, her hooves make a sound louder than her words. But her eyes, oh her eyes, are the loudest part of her body. They are louder than the promise of violence that races from her to meet the promise of his fear.
It's her eyes that say, have you come to find me?, in a look louder than any roar.
