There is a law a that her soul understands and it is not the law of this world.
There is a part of her that will forever quiver like a wilting rose between castle walls and merchant stalls. The wind howling through the stone-elk is singing that law to her in hollow, rebellious notes of deaths. They way it screams through their mighty antlers curling towards the too bright sun makes some part of her, some black-magic hole, break wide open.
And she can see it in their gritty eyes that are turned up towards that sun like winter-flowers begging to shed a frost. Her law, there in the stillness.
Thana doesn't need to wonder what they were looking at, all she knows is that it is something long gone (or dead). It is enough that she can walk among this menagerie of stone corpses and death-dust with only her hoof-steps thrumming slow as a heart beneath the howling wind. If her tail blade is dragging marks in the sand it is only one thin line tracing between the tracks of her steps, like the world is cracking wide open.
Maybe one side of herself will look at the side trapped across the split open world and smile. Maybe the parts of her would only needs to know a single law then.
It would be easier that way (if she could love the walls, and the glitz, and the wealth).
But when she finds the circle in the middle of the dead, stone herd she pauses like a beast who has just found home. There are claw marks in the dirt and Thana pauses to look at them like a map to something that she's ever been searching for. Somewhere in the belly of the canyon a hawk is screaming and further out an eagle is crying back a battle-cry. Her heart picks up a gallop through her chest because it's a song she remembers hearing, again and again, calling for her to follow, to come, to chase after it like a comet blazing through the endless black of space.
Thana runs until the dead elk are nothing more than a gathering of howling darkness and wind scream in the distance. She runs until the the feathers of a hawk are drawing out strange shadows across the belly of the canyon. Until she's frothed with sweat that smells of rot instead of salt she runs.
She runs until she seems him-- the man staring at the limestone and golden sun like it's a map only he can understand. Her heart is still thinking of that claw map, the one that sung below the howling wind of the only law her soul understands. And maybe it's why she steps close enough that he might be able to see the cracks of lighting running bone-white down her neck and across her face (like that line her tail drew in the sand).
And maybe it's why she nickers low in her throat at him.
Like a wolf.
@orestes
