Lilac floats to twilight in her eyes as the screech of bone and stone echoes like a rolling roar of thunder in her ears. Wrath turns liquid and quicksilver as starblood in her veins. It spills over her liver, and stomach, and rotten ovaries, like flies over blood-red wine spilled across a wood floor. Hunger spits, and froths, and snarls as it walks ten-legged and frantic up and down, up and down, up and down, her spine. And her hair rises across her back like a lion’s warning as the false god opens his mouth and laughs.
Seeds, wishbones, and opiate powder fall from his teeth like the starblood wrath that is still spilling across her liver.
Thana, or what is left of Thana, does not pause to see the look in Asterion’s eyes. She does not pause to smell the very marrow of her bones clinging to the hollow of his cheeks and the tainted air expelling from his lungs. She does not feel her heart leaping in her chest like a locust at the spine of a wheatgrass blade (like it’s trying to jump out of her chest and go home).
She does not pause to see, or look, or wonder. Because all she can do is listen to that opiate laugh bellowing out from an opalescent mouth. And she watches, in a way that is very much not a look, as the seed and wishbones fall from the lips of the false.
And Thana does not laugh back, or whisper, or bellow out her rage like a lion. She is no mortal thing that makes sound from her rage, or music from her war. She is no thing at all.
Here, in the belly of the castle with twilight glimmering pale and bruise-dark on her cheeks, she is not a single cell of anything. She is a fog rolling in from the sea that a single horizon cannot tame. She is a knock on a door superimposed upon the bleating sounds of sorrow from a mortal’s broken heart. She is the black cosmos whittling children out of the moon until not even a sickle sliver of light is left. She is an abyss with a bloated belly of abominations. She is magic. She is death. There is nothing that she is not.
And she does not laugh because she does not know how to feel so gentle a thing as that. Nor does she scrape her horn down the wall in warning again when she lunges towards the gap thighs of the monster when he raises his body onto two legs like a grizzly bear. Eligos follows closely behind.
Her teeth do not spit out opiate dreams and her throat does not echo with a scratching hiss of wishbone and sinew. Her teeth only know violence-- only violence.
But her teeth learn something new when she uses them to rip out the monster-god’s kneecap from the tender boughs of his birch legs. And what new taste they learn, they learn well.
@Asterion
