It is just before dawn. The woods are as black as the pocket of a dead star, smothered by the canopy. The only light for miles is his, each tooth of lightning biting at the barks of old trees, veins of blue light so loud it hurts to hear.
Andras is hungry for some black and nameless thing, an ache that defies his language but grows from the cauldron of his rage and breaks across his skin at a rising volume; at first it is just a hum below the screech of coyotes and the persistent song of birds that sing through the night, but as he walks it swells into something louder, the mechanical hum of a sub-station, a crackling rumble that turns the whole of Viride to silence.
The time has come and gone for patience, and diligence, and poise. It sits behind him, in an empty city with long tables and white, clean stone. He has no more patience for bookstores and carefully cultivated gardens. It is a time for teeth and bone, blood and bruise, for savage things to beat their feet on the deer tracks like thunder.
It is time to become a calamity.
When he sees her the machinery of him locks into place, a loud thunk that rattles through him like stormwind. She is a strange violet in the branches of light arching off his back, his wings, his face. The sharp spear of her horn cuts the black reflected on black of his lenses when he looks at it. He draws a sharp breath, almost a gasp.
Andras swallows the grin that crawls up from his throat. His skin crackles like wildfire, the buzz of his rage growing louder, and louder, and louder. A familiar panic settles deep in his bones. The promise of something bad, bad, bad.
"Ah, here she is." he says. His mouth twitches.
Perfect.
sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men
let this whole town hear your knuckles crack
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
Andras is standing in a dangerous place.
Nothing that wants to live stands so calmly before the tip of a unicorn's horn. And nothing, monster or mortal, steps into that void (her void, her blackness, her violence), and smiles like she's more horse than beast, more tame than unicorn. And yet, here he is, her Warden with his sparks begging to burn down her forest.
Thana smiles at him and it's not a gentle look. It's another blade, another hungry row of bone begging for blood and flesh. Perhaps there should be compassion in the way she looks at him in this forest full of dead things and more bones, and drops of blood, than leaves. Perhaps there should be something that does not look so much like the way she looked at their regent once.
Perhaps there should not be so much hunger in the way her eyes trace the sparks running across his skin. But deep inside her, the thing made looks at his electric shine and says mine.
.
She steps closer. That dangerous void that he's standing in starts to shrink and wither. The darkness beyond him presses in too. It grows scales, and fur, and star-bright teeth, as it steps into the smoldering glow of the warden's rage. And when it growls, a sound more furious comet falling into the atmosphere than predator, Thana's look of hunger only deepens.
“Oh,” She says it like a sigh, like contentment, like a belly full of gore. Eligos's growl sounds like a hum now, like Andras and his electric roar is not the only thing here that knows how to silence the birds and the mice. The moon slices through the canopy. It's still feels molten to her, silver ore instead of stardust, blades instead of moon-flowers. It still feels like fire.
So many things are begging to burn tonight. So many things.
The hunger in her look does not fade. It never fades now, not with the bone forest reaching out around her like teeth biting into the flesh of the night. “Have you come looking for us?” Us. She says. Us. Like it's not a threat, like the violence behind him is a thing instead of a prediction of war, and wrath, and a million cold, sodden deaths.
Please. Eligos asks her the only way monsters ask, all demand instead of begging.
Thana doesn't answer him or look beyond Andras at her violence (tethered to her by mercy). She doesn't do anything but look at the Warden with that look upon her face and her words, her belly full of gore, dissolving into all the humming around them.
The night inhales. Around the electric hum and the hunger hum, it inhales.
Maybe he should ask himself. Maybe he should peel back the layers of flesh and sludge and the sticky black venom that binds them. Maybe he should dig around in his dark dirty caverns, see if he finds more than grime beneath his nails and a voice from the deep that says yes over and over, a drum in the core of him that centers its eyes on the hostile spear of her horn and grins with his mouth.
Andras knows what he will find there. He thinks he does not have to look to see it. He thinks he knows its shape and its voice because it fills him like his thunder and if there is room in him for anything but this nameless rage, this desperate and all-encompassing savagery-- he does not want to know. Not tonight, at least.
Tonight, when the dark is heavy and thick on his skin and in his throat, the kind of lightless night that hunts deer in the woods. Tonight, with his toe on the line and his hungry, hungry heart like a trapped bird in his chest, all wings and screeching. Tonight, when Thana turns her face on him and Andras wonders for the second time in his life if a woman would unmake him given the chance.
The thought of it makes his mouth water.
Air pressure changes, heat closes in from behind. When Thana's beast growls it is a sound that Andras hears in his bones and his bones answer, perfect. The beast-hum and the electric hum are so loud he almost doesn't hear her sigh, almost doesn't see the light of his magic dance across the surface of her horn. On all sides there is danger, danger in front and behind and without and within.
His magic hums along like it knows this song, like it knows it is just as beastly as any monstrous thing. Have you come looking for us? she asks, and Andras grins with a mouth full of teeth and magic.
"I have," he breathes, below the sharp pop of his magic, the baritone growl of her hunger, the impatient puff of her ghost. The warden lifts his wings off his back and squares his shoulders.
Eligos aches, please, in her ear, though Andras can't hear it.
Andras dares, please, as he meets her eye and the bird in his chest beats its wings on his ribs.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
Beyond them the darkness is immaculate, almost holy, almost grotesque. It's thicker somehow where his electric hum and her rot touch, where they both thicken the darkness and devour it. Perhaps if there wasn't this rage in her, this fury, this retribution without a head to hang, she would have stepped away into the beauty of it. But her bones feel molten, white and thick as blood, beneath the live-wire itch of her skin.
Somewhere there are still poachers on the outskirts of her forest, with their knives and their snares and their thoughts of superiority. And here is the Warden squaring his shoulders and flaring his wings like a the hilt of a blade being touched for the first time. Something in Thana answers back, to the poachers and their mortal bodies and the Warden with his wings that will not be fast enough to save him.
The forest quivers. Leave start to fall around them as the trees bow above her, their branches gone soft with terminates and rot. The ground turns to swamp that clings to their hooves and turns the air metallic with sulfur. Death knocks, in the silence, it knocks once against that immaculate, almost holy, almost grotesque, darkness.
And then it opens the door.
Thana steps closer-- closer and closer until she can feel the hum of his electric wrath that seems such a tiny thing to all the conquering rage roaring in her skin. He has never looked as mortal as he does now, flaring his wings against a creature with the soul purpose of unmaking this plane of existence. She is not smiling at him now. Her expression has darkened, broken itself down to the teeth behind her lips, the tilt of her horn arced towards him rather than away, the curl of her tail-blade rising up over her hip like a snake half awake.
“For what reason?” The expression on her face, the suggestion of desecration, does not waiver despite the softness of her voice. It's the only way she can tell him to move away, to coil his mortal wings and his mortal magic back to his side and fade into the darkness beyond him. It's all nothing more than a whisper, the hope, such a small thing compared to that please still echoing between her and Eligos.
And but for the lowering of her horn, the whisper of it in the air and the sulfur sting on her tongue, Thana does not move while she waits for permission to unmake him. At least, later, she'll be able to tell Ipomoea that she had not been the first to strike.
When Thana screws her eye to his he should feel something more than the bolt of deranged joy that slithers its way down his back–he should scream when the ground starts to soften beneath him. Instead, Andras sucks in a breath that is not quite a gasp and holds it.
The trees bend around them and Andras thinks for the last time tonight that there is much to do. There is death in their woods. There are monsters with smiles like smooth butter and knives made to skin and to peel.
There are monsters out there that are not Thana and Andras with their wild, angry magic, and their clenched teeth, and their voices that say yes so much louder than the night that squeezes their throats. But all he can feels is the night as it melts under her touch. All he can hear is its heart as paces faster, and faster, and faster. All he can taste is the ecstasy of impending doom, the sort of joy that only comes running high from demise.
She slides closer still, like a snake in the underbrush, and she thinks he has never looked more mortal. Andras sees the glint in her eyes, the sharp point of her horn, the earth itself bent in a circle to frame them, and Andras thinks that he has perhaps never felt more mortal, either. He shudders.
For what purpose? Thana asks. Her voice is almost inaudible under each fork of light that hums off of his skin with a buzz like a sub station coming apart.
He is so hungry. She is so hungry. And here they are slavering wolves with mouths full of lightning and rot. Andras’ smile glows bright blue when he clenches his teeth. “Do it.” he demands, or begs; the voice that comes out doesn’t sound like his own.
Andras doesn’t have patience for her restraint. He wants wild, he wants hungry, he wants to look her in the eyes and see the face of some old god that drives men to madness.
–and when he does, when he sees her face, poised like an asp, waiting to strike, the icy dread that runs him through comes too late.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
There are monsters in the woods.
Each monster is looking at Andras with his teeth bared and his arcs rising from his skin like electric mist. They are looking at him like wolves look at lambs, and doe, and rodents who look at the sky in wonder forgetting that the curl of their throat is so bare and beautiful as they do. And they step closer, the monsters, dragging their noses along the shadows pooling just outside his warm blood and his humming violence.
Yes, turns to now, now, now.
His magic is bright, and hungry, and Thana thinks it will taste sweet down in the bottom of her belly. Her hunger grows terrific and mighty.
She steps closer, inhaling the acrid smoke of her singing hair and flesh as the lighting cracks over her flesh. Muscles quiver at the sting and beg to freeze, but she does not stop pressing closer and closer. In the pain, and the acid, and the smoke rising from her own skin, Thana comes alive. Like a star imploding into the black cosmos she comes alive.
This time she does not try to hide the ache of her teeth, and her hunger, as she bares her teeth at him. Caution has turned to ash and blown away in the wind. She has nothing but violence left and the fury ebbs back and forth between desert-monster and unicorn like a white-frothed river. She does not think anything can turn her from the hunger now, from the crash of her magic against her ribs as it begs for a hole by which it might sink into Andras and devour him from the inside out.
Thana is only unicorn made to destroy the world now. She is not a champion and he is not a warden. They are two hungry things in the woods.
Andras has become nothing more than a stray in her forest, a curr hissing at the wildcat because it is starving.
Thana does not know how to take her teeth from the jugular of something weak.
Eligos steps closer and the ground trembles at the edges of his claws, begging to become something else now that the dirt has become bloated with the leaking blackness of their hunger. The hunch of his shoulders is a promise and the holes in the ground as he digs his back claws into the ground a wound in the earth that promises to spread, and bleed, and consume until there is nothing left.
“Submit.” She says and tt is the last gift she will give Andras.
Eligos lunges for a wing. Thana slashes towards his throat with her blade as her teeth beg for purchase into the sharp-sides of his body.
