Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
Sleeping in a cage between walls is still strange enough that Thana rarely surrenders fully to the call of the moon. She sleeps as wild things do: fitfully, with nightmares, and unsettled despite the feel of love’s ribcage pressed tightly against her own. Tonight her dreams are feral things full of rabid spit, and monsters, and a river brighter and more blinding than a solar flare. She dreams of deserts, and caves full of dead dune monsters, and canyons above which a hawk is crying out in lament and in hunger.
And she remembers none of her dreams when the sound of her daughters streaking from their room awakens her.
But she is no less the monster in her dream as she follows them. And she is no less a graveyard of death when she tilts her horn into the moon and wanders through the winter-gardens of her king. Eligos is no less a thing in a canyon cave as he follows his unicorn, and her offspring, through the sickle moonlight and the winter snow brushing against his hollow belly.
They, monster and mother-unicorn, are disappointed in the twins for their trail left bright as a line of blood through the snow. Each had been taught better by way of horn, and blade, and tales of sufferings instead of happy endings.
But tomorrow is soon enough for another lesson. Tonight the monsters are curious.
And so they follow, beyond the gardens and the crests of dunes rising from the earth like lungs and hearts from a body. Their steps are near-silent in the winter and their forms are nothing more than a blot of darkness against so many other bruises in the earth.
They follow until the night becomes wounded with lanterns and light. They weave between the horses that stare at them with eyes rimmed in the white of both caution and fear. Nothing turns their focus, not the music, or the whisper of sin, sin, sin, that calls to the dark creature living in their hearts. They follow the trail of lichen blooming across the mortar, and mushrooms creeping from the knots of banquet tables, until the twins are once more (safely) in their sights.
They call it instinct instead of love. They are wrong.
Thana lets a mortal offer her a drink with nothing more than a nod. Eligos presses his shoulder to her own and she can feel his body trembling with the need to hunt, and rend, and ruin, and consume. In their language she hums to him in notes of calm, calm, and later.
On the way home we will hunt and remind the desert monster of their gods. She says to him.
And he does reply, not in words but with a purr she feels like a second heartbeat begging entrance to her chest.
By the stage her daughters have cornered a mortal man. Even from the bar Thana can see the hunger in their eyes and the dip of hunger in their spines. She smiles with a mouth full of teeth that know the feel of flesh and the bitter tang of blood.
Below the eye my loves, she thinks, he cannot deny you entrance.
And when she sips whatever liquid the mortal has given her, it’s not liquor she tastes. It’s the blood of a poacher and the sweetness of cruel justice.
His dreams feel more like remembering than becoming now.
In his dreams he is running through the same deserts as her, miles and miles of dunes opening up like the mouths of monsters to nip at his heels. He can feel the shadow of the hawk falling across his back, blending with his own until running through the sand feels as much like flying over it. Even when he wakes — alone, in an empty bed in an empty castle — it still feels like flying.
And he knows the dream was not entirely a dream.
So it does not surprise him to find their trails leading out into the night, marked with lichen blossoming in poppy patterns and the song of the bitter earth whispering in between each petal. In their footprints he finds the sound of old death, of fallen seeds that could not root and grains of sand that whisper stories of bones and catacombs and hunger. He would still know the sound of it even if it was not his unicorns carving the notes of it, because it sounds something like home.
He is still listening to that song, their song, when he follows after it. He follows the song of unicorns and all things wild, and as the snow turns to sand he leaves wildflowers blooming in the crescent moon of each of their steps.
And when the lanterns and light break the night wide open, he almost —
he almost starts to sing the words to it.
He does say anything when he arrives beside her, following her violent and violet gaze to where their daughters are limned in golden light (like a sapling, he thinks, dying and growing in a thicket.)
The music settles like bits of the desert tangled in knots around his soul, all sand and spines and tumbleweeds. And it does nothing to settle his heart, seeing the twins standing together like wolves among lions. The restlessness only grows like rot in the marrow of him, seeing their hunger hung like nooses from their horns and filling the spaces between their teeth.
“They’ve grown like weeds,” he says softly. Sometimes he wishes they were more like the forest — he wishes he could tell them that it was okay to grow slowly, to be tender, to take their time sending out roots and branches and leaves. Sometimes he is afraid they are blooming too brightly, too quickly, like the poppies that never last the whole spring.
But their souls are wild, and feral, and already filled with enough color to make all the world seem gray beside them.
And watching them now, changing the meaning of the music draped around them like a crown, he thinks that is the only thing that matters.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
If there is a root to hunger it lives in the hollow shadows in the dark violet of Thana's gaze. She is root, and seedpod, and water so bright it burns. From her it leaks like new growth, inch after inch until the forest floor it hard with the miles of her wrath. And turns to dead-roots, and dead-growth, when the stallion turns to tap a horn to her daughter's.
A spark lights and brightly as a star and as blinding as god-water.
Eligos snarls, his purr turned to ire and a wrath more rabid than it is rage. Thana can feel the stiffness in his shoulders in the way it echoes her own when her glass falls forgotten to the floor. In the crashing chime of it, a sound like wishes falling into the sea, they are already baring their teeth and clacking their teeth in a death knell. They step forward.
And then the only thing (the only thing) that can stop the seeding of the killing fields joins them.
Thana's heart leaps like a wolf at a hare in water. It flutters like a hawk at a vole. It roars like a lion in old rib cage. It stutters and changes the song of it to match his-- forests blooming in winter, snow-bears snarling at the cougar, nightshade blooming on jasmine vines. And she wonders if any other heart by her own could hear the death in the sweetness of his heart, the hardness in the kindness of his smile, the way he's the gentle hand of death to the saviors (and not the harsh punch of her death notes).
Eligos does not feel a stutter in this chest. He only feels hunger, and god-wrath, and the feel of horns picking out the bone shards from his teeth. And this time when he snarls there is no please in it before he pulls away from the unicorn and her heart. His hunger is too mighty to be held by them now. The twin unicorns have more promise in their gazes than Thana does and so it’s to them that he moves.
One eye remains on the twins as she turns to her king, her Ipomoea in a way that he does not belong to anyone else. She presses her cheek to his in the ways of wolves and lions greeting their mates. Her horn spirals above her, gathering light like a net in the dabbled lantern-light. The sound in the room around them turns to images: lovers and loveless hearts, killers and thieves, roots and flowers, their daughters and almost-corpses).
It’s like watching a poem gather in little army lines around them.
“Unicorns do not know how to grow any other way.” And there is a warning and a promise (the same one she’s taught her daughter’s on the training grounds) in her too-bright when she pulls her cheek from it. The distance feels like a wound both carved and branded into her skin, a fresh scar to mark trails in the map lines of war across her bloody form.
The drops of liquor at her feet mold, and ferment, and draw all the flies in the room closer. The humming sound turns to another image in the corner of her gaze like a punch to the heart. “ And I look forward to witnessing all the other ways in which they are unicorns.” That same look, the one taking over the lines of her daughter’s perfect faces, sparks and smolders in between the shadows of love that live only when she’s looking at him.
Beyond the light of the party, beyond the sandstone walls and the crystal glasses and the music that sounds like endings instead of beginnings, there is the desert. And that desert is violent, and wild, and calls to his heart in a way the forests and the flowers never will. There is a part of him that wants to turn to the darkness waiting for him between the dunes, to lose himself in the endless raging miles of it instead of watching a hundred people pretending they are only dancing and not just trying to feel alive.
There is grit between his teeth. And cactus spines wedged into his hooves. And his heart is slowly gathering sand like an hourglass, like he’s one second away from being buried alive.
It feels like a prophecy being fulfilled, every time he steps back into the desert.
But Thana is here, and that is enough to draw him into a palace he has no desire (no right) to be in. And his daughters, with their perfect, still-fragile skin that barely holds back their immortality and magic are snarling like wolves in the corner of his vision when he presses his cheek to her’s. And if he listens long enough to hear the way his heart leaps violently at every discordant note the music makes (like a crescendo for his daughters’ hunger-notes), it is lost in the feel of her skin against his own.
He leans into it, into her, and the song that exists only when they are together. Flowers that are blooming and wilting. Leaves unfurling and reshaping like flesh and form. Hearts that have been starved of touch and then given it back all at once, in colors and nerve-endings and hunger.
Everything else feels like a river running swiftly away beside it. And Ipomoea, who has learned to wilt and bloom and rise and fall at the same time, is letting it carry him.
“And they are perfect,” he murmurs when she widens the distance between them. And instead of closing it, or turning as she turns at the sound of horns tapping against horns, he only watches the way the light plays against her jaw, and turns the violet of her violent eyes almost-golden when she turns to look at their daughters.
There was a time when he might have run from the killing-look in her eyes. But that was a time when he had tried all winter long to save a garden of roses (and at the end of it had had only one left, that had gone grey and bent in its sorrow of being the last one to die). A time when he had feared the way his heart beat violently each time he turned to the desert, before he remembered that his dreams had only ever been chasing and being chased by it.
Now he knows that same look lives buried beneath the petals and the roots of his own heart.
He reaches out then to trace the light along her shoulder with his muzzle, and he forgets all about shifting sands and rotten leaves. There is only the press of life closing in around death (or is it the other way around? He’s never sure, when he’s with her, which of the two is winning — if either is winning at all), both in the touch that exists between them and in the look in his daughter’s eyes as they close like young gods around a mortal.
And through it all is his heart, speeding up and slowing down, skipping and leaping and trembling like flowers in a storm, unsure if their roots are deep enough to withstand the wind. "I know him," he whispers against his skin, and all he hears is the tap, tap, tapping of horns against one another.
And he knows if there is anyone in the room who should be afraid tonight, it is Vercingtorix.
But still his heart lurches when a ruby-red horn spirals down one as dark as night.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
Once roused her feelings become a thing of teeth, and fur, and claws that cut instead of clack. That beast grows roots like a fox skull grows wisteria at the tip of her daughters’ horns. It blossoms and blooms and rises its locust face towards Ipomoea’s warmth. But even as it turns, and blossoms, it does not give up the teeth in its mouth or its claws.
Those it will never give up. Not even for him.
And that thing of fur, and teeth, and claw, starts to purr when her daughter’s lay their weapons against the stallion. Somewhere Eligos is licking his teeth at the sight of it and whittling his nails to daggers on the diamond edges of a marble sculpture. Thana steps closer to the crowd of dancers, and mortals, and lambs lying down and preparing to spill their intestines across the pristine white of the floor. If Ipomoea’s touch lingers on her cheek, her side, the very bright and blinding center of her soul, she does not feel it when the stars outside start to feel like they are trembling and beginning to fall.
The music stutters to a stop like a candle blown out in a storm. There is the absence of the sound of light but there is, in the absence, a roar of thunder pouring in from the distance like a flood. Thana hears only the thunder, only the flood, when a mortal starts to bleating like something lost and half-dead.
She is reminded again (and again, and again, and again) why magic lives in her belly and war in her heart. This, this chorus of lambs, reminds her why unicorns-- true unicorns-- have always been made instead of born. And now they are many instead of one.
This fragile world should lament. It will lament.
And then, as all things but true unicorns do, it will die.
Thana steps deeper into the frantic crowd with her tail wrapped around the hock of her king to keep him from the tide of lambs; because that blinding and bright center of her soul is still saying, just this one thing, to the magic, just this. Around her, in the reflection of it across her pupil, the party becomes not a celebration but a killing field planted and awaiting the watering.
Their daughters and the stallion are still too far away and Isolt is already trying to pluck out his eyes like feathers from a dead hawk. Until this moment Thana did not know the feeling of pride. But it blooms in her now as another beast, another thing of tooth and claw and fur, to walk shoulder to shoulder with the first. And even now she can feel them walking, and racing, and snarling, in the pit of her stomach.
“If you know him,” She starts, pulling her tail cobra tighter around his leg, “tell me how he dies.”
Tell me, the unicorn asks her king, of all the ways I may be a monster.
There had been a way in which his soul moved once, like it was soil instead of sand, the sweet smell of a cactus’ flower instead of the bite of its spines. When he had been able to pretend the only thing calling out to his heart was the promise of the earth shaping itself into a home, where deserts were less than a memory, less than a shadow, less than a whisper spoken not in words, but in the spaces between heartbeats while he was sleeping.
It had been easier once, to pretend he was not every bit as sharp-edged and weathered as any sandstone wall shaped by the desert wind. That he was not formed of the same sun-bleached bones as all the others in this place.
But now being tugged through the party with Thana’s tail wrapped tightly around his hock, he cannot stop looking at all of their faces. And he cannot stop looking for himself in them, for the pieces he might recognize reflected in their eyes. And that bit of desert stuck in his soul sighs, and licks its teeth, and whispers we are home as it stretches out to fill his veins.
Home. In all the violence, all the hardness, all the life-defying-death moving in the ways only a desert knows how to.
So he lets himself be pulled along to her like a bit of driftwood following a current (she would always be the current he is caught in, he sees that now). And he knows his soul is moving to a different beat when the thunder echoing in Thana’s touch makes him lean only in instead of away. Where once he might have hated that, where once he might have torn away and run back to his forests, and his wildflower meadows, and his earth that knew only how to speak in petals and softness —
now, oh now Ipomoea is tracing every hard line of a stallion’s face like he is memorizing a battlefield. Like he is relearning again and again how to turn flowers into weapons by which he can carve the rage from another man’s skin.
Like he has forgotten that to take one man’s rage away is to multiply it with his own.
He presses his lips to Thana’s shoulder in a way that would be too hard to be called a kiss for anyone else. “The way all soldiers die,” he presses the words into her skin hard enough that she might feel the teeth behind it, the whisper of a warning that the desert-borne thing he has tried so hard to keep locked away has only been wearing away at the chains.
“At the end of a sword.”
Tonight he hopes that sword is forged only in the shape of a unicorn’s horn, carving out monsters from the world.
Ipomoea has stopped wondering if it makes him more or less of a monster himself.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
The twisted magic that made her would have forged Ipomoea into a unicorn.
It would have forged him from steel, and wood, and sand. There would have been a desert in his stomach made not of rend and ruin but of starvation for rain, and root, and flower. His wings would have sprouted from shoulder instead of fetlock and the entire sun would have been eclipsed in the expanse of them. Ipomoea would have been made to be dangerous in a way that no creature who must learn it can ever be.
That Ipomoea, the one made in magic with a horn upon his crown instead of a dagger on his leg, is the one Thana always sees. That Ipomoea is the one she’ll love until the end of every world in every universe, until it is only them standing on the cusp of the darkness like gods.
And it’s that Ipomoea that pushes his teeth into her shoulder in the only form of a kiss she knows how to ask for. Thana bends into the touch his teeth like a wolf bending for a collar and a leash. Beneath her sinew, and horror, she trembles like a butterfly caught in the tangled reeds of him. Each part of her, each hollow part, wants to beg for more teeth-- teeth and pain enough to fill up her hunger in a way nothing else can.
She can feel something waking up in him, an echo of the dark abyss that has always been awake in the center of her. It is calling to her with sonnets of rend, and ruin, consume. It is singing to her haikus of rain, and root, and flower. Thana wants to pull it out and turn it to wings to blot out every bit of the sun lingering in the desert in the dead of night. She wants to push teeth against it like he had pushed teeth against her shoulder.
“Then let us watch him discover it.” She folds around him to press the words into his skin like pearls, and paints, and a crack of veil too frail to mortals to see. Into the flesh of a thing made dangerous she smiles.
When she presses her hip to his, in the sonnets of rend-ruin-root that only they can hear, it feels like she’s paused upon that cusp of darkness in the body a hound with one foot in the gloom and three in the light. She slips into dance (to a song that only unicorns and things that would be forged into them can hear) and it’s like slipping into the creature in his skin.
And even as the night shifts to dawn, and their daughter’s turn from the soldier to return home, Thana never wants to fall out of the darkness she’s discovered the cusp of.
Perhaps he has always known she did not love him. That she did not love him, but an imagined him that lived in another world with her.
And perhaps he has always known that the thing that existed between them was borne only of hunger, of violence, of life chasing after death chasing after life. There was a time when he would have known what it made of him, to lean into this monster’s side while somewhere, another monster that is not so different from this one rots in a cell at his command.
There was a time when he would have done anything to keep himself from loving a monster. All he had wanted as a boy was to grow a garden for all the orphans of the desert like him, when he had been soft, when he had never been able to stomach the thought of killing another for his own hunger.
Now he has killed, and he has consumed, and he has watched the darkness creep further and further up his throat despite how hard he tried to swallow it down. Now he has invited the monsters into his woods and let them turn to death the things he would give his own life to protect.
He’d like to say that he turned then, that he pulled himself away from her side and ran from all the things that did not love him (the unicorns, the desert, the people bred from hardness.) He’d like to say that he remembered how to be soft, and how to love instead of hate.
But he only lets himself be pulled along after her. And he listens to that song that exists between only them. And he watches a soldier whose death he has already dreamt of.
