a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.

 dawn is deeper than the night and twilight had been when he found her that first time. The breeze is not ripe with the smell of fresh-bloomed roses and the bitter sweetness of fermented tulips. Rain is a promise on the breeze that whistles mournfully down her horn (just as she had known it would). At her belly the remains of meadow-grass, and wildflowers, are bowing in the wind and making her skin twitch with the feel of the earth, the forest, the root and stone, begging entrance into her body. 

Danaë blinks the lingering dew from her eyelashes and it the first drop of the spring rain to water the earth. 

She does not beg the hour to quicken, or the dawn to grow deeper into the dark blue of a storm-day. And she does not beg her heart to slow it's race towards the next hour as she keeps her gaze strained towards the forest he will need to cross to find her. 

Each of her poppies, and black roses, and willow-tree saplings, wave like small and frail banners as they led the way to her (instead of to a war as banners often lead). She can feel their eagerness as they rise from the dirt and char left behind from the festival. Each root had thought itself dead or suffering on the race to death. Below them a fox blinks with cornflower eyes and a hare flicks his wisteria ears back to brush the dirt of his spine as magic too weak to lift him from the dirt strains as hard as the pale unicorn is straining towards the woods. 

But Danaë does not see the beauty of her garden of grotesqueness or the shimmer of the grass where her dawn-tears had fallen. She does not see the rain cloud drawing wounds through the pale-blue of the deep dawn. All she can see is darkness upon darkness and tree brushing against tree in the forest as the wind starts to howl. 

All she can see is the emptiness of the hour as the dawn deepens into death and her magic rises in her heart to try to grow flowers in that too.