Danaë does not know much about fire-- why it is a hollow hunger without end, why the smoke spirals up instead of into the ground that is starving of want of carbon. Mortals are lingering around the flame, diving through the circles of them like frail hawks between clouds. Their thrilling avaravice for danger, and cleansing, and whatever else it is they are seeking, echoes in her ears like the wailing of the trees in the hurricane winds. 

And so she watches them, each bloody eye as intent as the eyes of a predator pack of rabid beasts, dissolve into the base chaos of mortals. Each time one singes the tip of their nose in the flames she images growing a morning glory from the black wound on their lips. Every time a horse bellows in victory she imagines etching out the sorrows of the dead-wood into the canvas of their brittle, mortal cheeks. Every time a horse tosses copper, and metal, and whatever else they call magic, into the flame she imagines tossing them into the fire to burn. 

She wonders who would leap with her then, when it’s not sorrowful wood burning but ignorant moral skin. 

Without her sister she is too cautious to stray to close with her heart wandering between the laments of dead-wood and the wrath of a unicorn made. In the darkness, just beyond the kiss of fire-light, she paces with her head slung low like a dragon and her tail lashing tracks into the damp, dawn earth like a lion before a hyena pack. Beneath her hooves buried voles, and rabbits, and mice devoured by owls, tremble as roots bloom between the sockets of their long gone eyes. Her soul flickers between unicorn wrath, and dead-prey lament, and something darker and needier than both. 

On the edge she waivers and with each blink she becomes something else. In the fire poppies, and jasmine, and nightshade bloom and burn in the knots of the dry wood. Her eyes gather the red-light, and blue-light, and amethyst-light, until her gaze is glowing with a hundred different shades of blood. 

With that bloody kaleidoscope gaze, she finally steps closer to the fire. She plummets off the cliff-edge of kindness into the black yawning jaw of the earth in which dead things tremble with those vine stitching their broken, dirt-fat, jaws back together. Danaë walks closer, and closer, on her graveyard of things trying so desperately to feel the heat of that fire. 

And when she stops, with her horn tossed violently into the smoke, her eyes blaze in the ways of unicorns and lions. Every inch of her body screams in the immortal challenge of a monster, and a mother, and a wolf with dead cubs in her womb, that for each inch of sorrow the wood had to suffer that a drop of mortal blood will be spilled in payment. 

Ants are being boiled in the fire, their exoskeletons cracked open and popping like bits of amber tossed into the flames. With them moths are burning and worms are digging deeper in the dirt desperate to feel any relent from the embers sinking into their homes. Skulls are charring in the heat from where they rest below the spring grass wavering in the night breeze. The entire meadow, the entire meadow, is fat with sorrow at the desecration religion has sliced open its throat with.

And for the first time Danae discovers what it is to look upon the beliefs of mortals and crave the unmaking of them all: tibia to tooth, femur to ventricle, rib to liver. Her mouth dampens as the thought and her belly rumbles like a bear in the dead of winter.

She is still listening to the popping ants, and the screaming moths, when the other unicorn approaches. On her skin, when Danaë licks her flavor and detangles it from the char of soot, she can taste brine and strangeness. Her soul, her made and terrible soul, bellows to her that this is not a unicorn, not in the way that anything is a unicorn.

Her teeth and tongue ache for the feel of femur, for the feel of anything to blot out the screams of the wood and the forest scavengers as they all die. A dead fox beneath her hooves clacks his broken teeth as roots weave his broken jaw bones back together. She swings her horn towards the approaching unicorn and a pillar of smoke, one clinging to the wanting hollows of her horns, follows.

She does not stop the arc of her horn until it is pointing at the hollow above the mortal’s left eye (the one begging to unfold, and unfurl, and root daisies in it). “The forest could have been something more than embers.” Her voice is little more and little less than a frothing snarl held together with those same woven together fox jaws.

The grass whispers under her hooves as she steps closer. A fox paw scrabbles at the dirt beneath her hooves but is too weak to be free of it. Beside the fire a stack of wood starts to bloom with a garden (wisteria, and lilacs, and mint). And the look in her eyes as they flicker to the new-born garden and back to the mare promises that it’s not rain that will water her foliage.

Life is nothing without rage, or violence, or love deeper and blacker than the ocean. It is nothing without ore turning to diamond in the belly of the earth and deadwood blooming flowers instead of ember. Life is nothing, nothing, at all to all the dark things swirling in eddies of rot and decay in her blood. But still, as this mockery of a unicorn steps closer, she cannot help but treasure all the fragility the mortals lays at her feet like a gift.

Danaë treasures it, but she will not save it. Not tonight.

“Why weep for what you can save?” Each step carries her closer, like the quiet wrath of a storm too far from the horizon to feel, to the point of the other unicorn’s horn. In her eyes, in each tight curl of her form as she coils like every wolf, and bear, and stag at the border of their territory, there is only life following closely on the heels of death. And when she exhales directly into the mortal’s lung it is the touch of a wolf’s nose to the pulse of a rabbit’s neck.

She does not laugh, or mock, or banter with the mouse come to the wendigo’s den. With the fire at her back, and the last tendrils of smoke in her horn dissapaiting to make room for the sinew of a kill, she is nothing but all the things in the wake of the night gazing out from the darkness at all the things that do not understand them.

A lion still feels the vole when they swallow them whole, each small movement an attack as useless as it is frantic.

Their horns sing when Danaë tosses her head to meet the warning tip of the mortal’s horn. She should not have paused to warn her like a child with a flame in the middle of the purring darkness. The blade of her tail curls upward to rest just below the steady pulse that sounds, to her, like the sea. “Shall I grow yarrow or cornflowers in you so that you too might be something more than pillars of ash and smoke?” And this time, when she smiles, it is with every ounce of violence, and ire, and rage of the ant exploding in a race towards death.

“Is it childish when I do not think it but know?” Each word is a snarl, a frothing rage only pretending to be tame as langage. Beneath her hooves mushrooms start to bloom where the fires had burned the night before and destroyed all the grass there. The smell of them is a festering thing, a rotting thing, a fermented flavor of the earth left behind in the wreckage of mortals. From the fire the smell of charred jasmine starts to rise in blooms of spiced smoke.

Danaë feels like she’s choking on it all as the mortal tries to hold her horn between her teeth and drag her into the flames.

And let it be remembered that her eyes wept with sorrow in that last moment, that last almost-mortal beat of her heart, before the wrath settled like a stone in her chest. A single tear, a lone regret, gathers bloody against her cheek before she leans into the feel of the other unicorn’s teeth. A single tear.

The world trembles at the bottom of the fire, where saplings start to rise out of the charred oaks and birches. Each is wet enough, new enough, green enough, that they do not burn completely before the leaves start to rise outside the flames. The tear in her eye is replaced by blood, and malice, and every raging sorrow of the dead forest, and the dead predators beneath them.

Her tailblade presses against the mortal’s throat, sharp and eager for all the sinew and blood beneath the skin. “If you were the sea once you are no longer, mortal.” The curls of her horn dig into the attack as vines grow from the cleaved out land to steady her. “It is not the tide I hear thrumming in your chest and it will not be brine that I spill when you are cleaved in two.” Danaë pushes her tailbade so closely that it might sink in and dig deep.

All she had wanted was to save the dead-trees in the fires and the charred grasses around the stones of them. All she had wanted was life instead of death-- and this, this will have to do.

“I will not be the one to burn with the trees and the flowers, tonight.” She snarls and every vine at her hooves bloom with holly-berries that stain the ground like blood when she steps on them to push the mortal back.

Mother and Isolt would have unmade this mare already. And still Danae tries, just a little, to save her before the death blow of the wicked tailblade poised at the mortal’s tender throat. .

Sometimes, to her, the entire world feels like a garden in a low-fog and a sickle moon. She can taste the brine in the air and the fermented sweetness of flowers gone to rot. Each step she walks is across a gravel-path made not with stones, or shells, or dirt packed down, but bones. And she can hear the crunch of skulls, and knee-caps, and teeth, beneath her hooves as she walks closer and closer towards the gate beyond which a million more gardens wait.

The world feels like an endless garden now, when the rage spirals back into her like a buckshot and the mare pulls back. Danaë feels like a seed caught on the wind instead of on a leaf upon the forest floor. All she had wanted to do is sink deep into the loam of the mare and plant down miles and miles of roots. For a moment she hangs there, between seed and wrath, and swings like a corpse on a noose by the sea.

She blinks and it is to the image of the mare unmade superimposed in the darkness. Another blink, another shape by which she might recreate the unicorn-who-lost-her-sea.

And when she opens her eyes there is still an ember of wrath in her bloody gaze. Every ounce of her fury at the celebration has been whittled like a spear onto this point by which the other unicorn speaks. Danaë watches only the darkness between her teeth instead of the smoke of the words when the wind pushes the fire towards them. It takes her longer than it should to form sound into a language that sounds different than wrath and ruin.

Her laughter surprises her for it is a sound her father has made (one that always made her mother look too long-- as if she could see the marrow of it if she looked hard enough). That bloody tear catches in her lips like a seed finally caught in the dirt.  “You do not know enough of death if you are not afraid of it.” Danaë’s look turns to teeth, a dim echo of that wrath still clawing at her insides, before she too steps back.

It feels like tearing her own skin away from her sinew.

Everything in her is too raw, too hungry, too whittled down into the shape of her mother, to care for the story promised in the mortal’s words. The look in her eye, that ember in the blood, gives away the regality in her bones and her genes. She had not thought pride a trait of hers but she does not mind it so much when faced with too-brave mares in her parent’s city. It is a better feeling than the one left in the wake of the image of the mare unmade.

“If you touch me again, there is not a corner of this world in which you will be allowed to live.” The blade of her tail makes an echoing sound, like a church’s throat, when she lets it fall to the ground. Or maybe it is the echoing sound of a distant drum-of-war echoing in spirals across the horizon.

And she does not wait for the echoing sound of it to fade before she turns back towards the fire her plants are choking out.