I'LL BE YOUR SWEETEST MOUTH IF YOU LET ME -
watch me reach down my throat, cut my teeth / on a new name. If you open wide / and swallow deep, you can even forget / the taste of all that blood.

“Phantom. Your heart must be a ghost."

Flesh, even ruined and cold, is still flesh. There is still the fodder for the roots and the worms in the hallways of sinew and the twisted maplines of blood. Flesh, no matter the rot and ruin, is still the thing upon which a forest feeds and feasts. And that, the forests full of woe-eyed does and clever-eyed foxes, is the domain of unicorns.

Danaë knows it, as well as she knows the way in which her weapon crown tangles with her sister’s, and so she wonders of the ways this graveyard of dead stars and icy glass sings so sweetly to her. Each beat of their hearts, pale echoes of the still hearts upon which they stand, echoes like a symphony of roars in her soul. She whittles the bones down with her tailblade just to hear the roars turn to sobs.

The pegasus is a still thing, a strange thing, to turn away so easily from the scars of death and the dead-seeing look of pearl eyes. Danaë cannot look away, not when the smoke spires rise like the horns of the earth towards the organs waiting in the warm belly of the sky. It is her first look of war, of things made by the wreckage of mortals and immortals born, and she cannot (will not) look away.

“If you have to ask,” she says in a whisper thin and twisted as a thorn vine around her horn, “the lovely things are not for you.” Her look, a thing learned in the rotten womb of her mother, brightens as a jugular in the air and not as a sickle moon in the darkness should. Her hooves thunder as distant and winter-weak does when she steps closer.  The melody of her heart quickens into a song of wood frogs in a vernal pool.

A star whispers to her of its dream that lay dead and cold in the glass bones of it. It whispers of fire, and darkness, and a cold so deep that it steals the breath from her lungs when she thinks of it.

Her breath is still a stuttering note in her chest, her heart that wood frog song, her tail a sob, when she reaches her nose out with the air of stars exhaling through her throat. “Who are you?” The words seem almost half formed on her tongue as the language of mortals often sounds on the lips of gods.

Her shadow, a reflection instead of darkness, waivers like a shark beneath the black sea when she touches her star-breath lips to the cheek of the girl who cannot see as a unicorn does. And beyond them the pearl eyes still do not blink as they fathom the endless universe.

Danaë blinks.

And she sighs.




"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”

I'LL BE YOUR SWEETEST MOUTH IF YOU LET ME -
watch me reach down my throat, cut my teeth / on a new name. If you open wide / and swallow deep, you can even forget / the taste of all that blood.

“Phantom. Your heart must be a ghost."

If she finds the feel of perishable flesh beneath her lips anything but beautiful she does not give away the secret of it. Her lungs and the spaces between her teeth are too full of star-breath and star-stuff to hold anything else but this weight of memory and the sweetness of the perishable. When her eyes fall over the cheek of the living, and the pearls of the dead, she tucks not one but two memories into the marrow of her wanting, aching bones (the ones that do not know how to be full).

Her tailblade draws lines behind her as her look waivers between unicorn, mother, and spire of smoke made from ash. She hums in the echoing toll of her sigh because this, this signing and carrying of dead things, is easier than shaping her insides into language.

Another sigh. Another hum. “Who did you prefer being?” Her eyes drift again, over a wing, a horn, and settle on the smoke spires and the whittled down bones. At her back, below the sickle point of her twitching tail, a pair of lilies blooms. And this time when she inhales it’s with the flavor of dead-stars, and newborn lilies, and girl-who-died, on her tongue like cloves and anise.

Her own name is dead in the silence. She is too full of other things to remember the shapes her tongue must make to say it.

And so it is a nameless unicorn that steps forward and around the living girl and her dead memory. Shivers race electric across her shoulders when she brushes up against feathers instead of skin. Behind her pale lips her teeth, her tongue, her throat, set to aching as if she’s become a bear in the middle of winter. Lilies follow her in bundles of blooms upon the bones of a universe. They die after shadow passes.

“I know what this place is.” Dust catches in her nose as she drags her lips across a star-corpse. Images waiver in the bones-- stags, and wolves, and foxes with limp quails in their jaws. Vines drag one image to the next and wisteria wipes away the echo of it. A star flashes across the mirror like a swan falling dead from the sky (blazing white to black ash). “It is a graveyard.” Her lilies turn to poppies, bright and bloody as she is pale. And when she turns her eyes toward the mare and they blink, blink, blink as the images in the bones do, there is a certain bloodiness lingering there too.

She pauses, the nameless thing caught in the memory of bones, with one hoof paused in the air like a hunting lion. Her lungs stutter in her chest as her heart forgets (as she has forgotten her name) the way that it should thunder in a faint metronome. “But I do not know what it was.” That paused hoof falls and it is thunder in the distant reality beyond this dark, gloaming world. “Do you?” And the dark ghost that runs across her eyes suggests that what was does not matter to her as much as the dying of it does.

Another lily unfurls above a frail seedling of a crimson poppy.





"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”

I'LL BE YOUR SWEETEST MOUTH IF YOU LET ME -
watch me reach down my throat, cut my teeth / on a new name. If you open wide / and swallow deep, you can even forget / the taste of all that blood.

“Phantom. Your heart must be a ghost."

She knows there is a fire in her horn, a pyre of it on which some-thing she cannot name burns. Across the sight of the golden forest, and the smoke pillars of war, and the poppies making promises she cannot see it. But she knows it is there-- she can feel it like a heart that has crawled its way free from her chest by way of vine and thorn.

She is a unicorn aflame, a pyre of her own, a graveyard full of eternal flames that burn in the dead of winter.

And she turns those bloody, inferno eyes to the graveyard and the girl. All she can see is fire, and fire, and dead-wood, and nothing else but things so frail and mortal that they can do nothing else but burn. Like a god she wonders, as she tucks her nose back onto the star bones (in a way that is almost motherly) what she might shape the world into after it’s decaying around her in gardens and black, and moss, and lichen.

It will worship her, she knows, but she wonders what it will think when the world discovers that the only sound it knows how to make is that drumming warsong of her made heart.

“Will you let me know,” she starts with an ache in her cheek when it leaves the bone mirrors, “when you discover which?” And she knows, when she blinks her eyes into the juxtaposed image of an etched upon rib, that she already knows which one she would prefer being. But unicorns have always known their own hearts, their own soul, their own grotesque hungers, and she tries not to blame the mortal for her ignorance.

Her eyes close on the image of starlings, and sparrows, and wings dripping ash like wish-fat stars as they beat like a heart. Each organ in her form trembles and flutters like a pair of wings divided. The fire in her horn spits embers and sparks in the same way her mother’s smile spits blood and furry.

When she opens her eyes, on a sigh that sounds like those same wish-fat stars falling, she smiles because she does not know anything else to do that does not have her laying her teeth against the mortal’s throat in a holy kiss. “When they burned what did your starlings become?” She steps closer. Her belly swallows the same smoldering flame living in the curls of her horn. “Did you stop to wonder at all?” And this time, when she blinks and opens her eyes again it’s not a carved rib flashing across her eyelids in strobelight.

It’s a reflection of her own form dissolving into a spire of war-smoke in a graveyard ripe with the death of wish-fat stars.




"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”

I'LL BE YOUR SWEETEST MOUTH IF YOU LET ME -
watch me reach down my throat, cut my teeth / on a new name. If you open wide / and swallow deep, you can even forget / the taste of all that blood.

“Phantom. Your heart must be a ghost."

Sometimes, and that some is more than sum, she wonders which world is dream and which is real. Each time she blinks her eyes (again, again, again, each faster than the last) there is that flash of carved upon bone and the superimposed brightness of flesh. There are flowers in the holes of each, like parasites, and they blink at her as they unfurl.

They whisper too, in the space between the inhale and the exhale, of memories her marrow knows. Her mind stumbles long legged and young over those memories as she tries to find them in the reflection of a pegasus.

And in the choke-hold of a memory, one in which her horn is screaming in the wind instead of singing, she steps closer to the girl. Later she’ll tell herself it was the agony of those dead sparrows that had her horn tilting like a blade instead of a kiss towards the girl. Later she’ll tell herself that she imagined ways to save her instead of kill her. Later she’ll tell herself that the darkness of her gaze, like iron in the tide, was nothing more than hope.

Nothing more than hope…

Danaë, who is still more unicorn than innocent (they eat the innocent after all-- once they’ve laid their heads on their fragile, mortal chests), moves to rest her horn across the pegasus’s brow. And she blinks one last time-- bone, flesh, bone-- before exhaling the last breath of every starling that burned. She can feel them, feel their frantic wings trying to shake loose the embers and the soot, in the walls of her heart.

The smoke of her breath in the cool graveyard air spirals out in stuttering plumes of mist and smoke. It rises, and rises, and rises, like all those starlings never will. They never will-- until she saves them. And her smile stumbles into darkness at the thought.

“You only need to look for your starlings to find me.” The redness of her eyes, that iron in the tide look, flutters like an ember-heavy wing beneath her forelock. She pulls away and tries, oh she tries so hard, to bury the roar of her heart-denied horn upon her brow. It bellows, and roars, and promises retribution. It aches and her tail blade echoes against the floor like a wolf’s tail against a door-- open up, open up, open up.

Let me in.

She takes another step, opening up that doorway between them upon which she knocks but hesitates still to cross. Her father’s blood still rushes through her, light to the black and life to the rot. And it’s her father’s blood that rules when she scrapes her tail down the mirror to leave a single scar down the images there.

It’s her father’s blood that blooms poppies in the bones of stars as she gallops into the darkness in search of the starlings that have been forgotten by girls who do not know which life they prefer to live. Danaë, with a bellowing cry, thinks she’ll always choose the starlings.

Always.





"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”