And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
Her magic is the same furious thing has always been, even as his reaches out for it, even as Thana's heart trembles like a leaf to feel the kiss of life against it. It knows this battle in the core of it. This is a war her magic was born fighting, back in the grotesque world it came from, and it has never discovered the end of its need.
And Thana is near helpless to it, to the force of her making and the way it's diving for the throat of his magic by way of the fading stag. Her horn sets to aching, her skin shivering, her blood racing, and her heart still trembles and sighs like porcelain thrown from a cliff. Cracks start to run through the chambers of it.
The distance remains between them. For the first time she does nothing to close it. Her magic is still flooding the trees, the earth, the worms, trying to consume a path through his. It does not realize it's too late, too late, too late. It does not realize that Ipomoea's magic is a creature larger than it. And even as the stag's heart stops, her magic is still there, seeding moss over bones, and rot over the edges of skin.
Thana sees none of this.
She can only hear the way Ipomoea's heart stops with the stag, the way his lungs start to sing a death-rattle. In the place below her magic Thana starts to cry. No, no, no. Her heart shatters. Like a planet caught in a black-hole it shatters. She's about to collapse into the rot and dirt when Eligos reaches them and presses his nose against her rib-cage.
Eligos's touch gives her the strength to move towards Ipomoea-who-seems-near-dead. Her teeth pull at the briars and thorns around him. They cut her lips, her legs, and they tangle in the hollow curls of her horn. Her magic settles again at the feel of bramble and the smell of forest rot. Silence soothes rot even as it fills Thana with a hundred different shapes of wrath, and fear, and fury.
The stag is nothing more than a distant thought to her now. There is only the lingering scent of iron to suggest that it had been there at all. To her there are only brambles, Ipomoea, and Eligos (who is starting to join her pulling the roots from the earth). “Breathe” Her voice discovers new notes when she presses it to his cheek. Fear and wrath, worry and rage, there are a hundred combinations of emotion embedded into her voice like the thorns embedded into the earth.
“For me.” There is no peace in this silence, not for her.
But when Eligos turns to look at the stag he knows the peace that comes with looking at another monster made by magic, by violence, and by blood watering the earth.
@Ipomoea
