widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me

lowly, not in moments but in days, scripture is piling up on the grimoire pages of her. Not every memory, curled up like ink pooling in shadows behind her gaze, carries with a name, a smell, or a heartbeat song. Some are nothing more than whippoorwills in a breeze, both a tower and a bowed back all at once. Some memories, like the shadow of Aspara and her wolf, are something more.

Danaë blinks as they disappear into the star-corpses and wishes caught.

For a moment it feels like she’s slipped outside her own skin and into the churning belly of the monster waiting inside Isolt. Her heart remembers how to leap into the thrill of a hunt that has unfurled as suddenly as a spring flower (one day it is there with no memory of the unfolding). Her hooves remember the ache of miles, and miles, of exhaustion. The flutter in her lungs has nothing to do with dreaming, or the wonder of flowers, or the thrill of watching a fledgling fall from a nest and discovering that it suddenly belongs to her instead of the forest. And the way she leans her neck forward below her sister’s, into that lingering whisper of winter and sunflower, is not a submission but a challenge.

It feels so good, so terribly good, to be a thing outside a unicorn who can only grow a garden in a corpse of the earth. There is something freeing in feeling hunger in place of sorrow, wrath in place of lament.

But like all things, all memories that ebb and flow in inkblots behind her eyes, she cannot keep the feeling. Her bloody gaze fades to the soft-red of a spring rose yet unframed by thorns. The top of her neck brushes her sister’s throat like a leaf against a leaf instead of like a wolf against its alpha. Blade brushes blade, an assurance that some days they can sing in something outside death.

Her gaze follows the ghost of Aspara and her wolf.

Another puddle of ink pools behind her eyes when she leans her weight against Isolt and lets the mirrors crumble down to dust around them. And another, and another, and another until the black dots of ink turn themselves in a chasm instead of a grimoire.

{ @Isolt @Aspara"speaks" notes: <3

There are no roots in my heart, only the holes they left behind when they rotted away. And in those holes the hunger found a home, a new place to stretch, to grow, to fill. We could show this other-unicorn what it means to be a unicorn, a true-unicorn — the answer is there between my teeth when I smile.

---

She does not stop to wonder if Danaë can feel the way her cheek trembles beneath her touch. Beneath her skin she can feel her second-heart (her soul-heart) unfurling like dahlias that Isolt presses into, presses hard enough to feel each petal and serrated leaf digging into her skin.

If there was a way to fill herself with them instead of their death, she would. If there was a way to replace her hunger with her sister’s sorrow, she would gladly use her own blade to make the first cut by which to bleed it all out.

Sometimes Isolt thinks the only mistake that was made when they were born is that they should be divided so cleanly into hunger and sorrow, rage and aversion. She thinks it is wrong that they should be such extremes, as much as she thinks it right that the only thing in this world that should exist to balance her would be her twin.

But when she presses into her sister and watches Aspara and her wolf trail away, she is trying to fill herself with her sister. With her softness, with her sorrow, with her petals that weep like tears from the dahlias. She is trying to find an end to all of this hunger and pain that begs her to chase after the other-unicorn, to run and run and not stop until she has made a corpse for her sister to turn into a garden.

She trembles from the pain of watching her leave. And she presses her trembling shoulder into her sister’s because she knows she is the only one who will understand.

When the first mirror crumbles to dust, her eyes slip closed with a sigh. And when the second crashes beside the first she feels the trembling begin to slow, and the aching begin to ease. As the third falls she is holding her sister’s weight like it is the only thing in the world she was made to carry, as star-skeleton after star-skeleton collapses around them.

And the only thing she is wondering then, is how much of these dead-stars they can return to the earth.

§

i wonder what i look like
in your eyes