The night grew shorter now, spring fading into summer and stretching into longer stretches of daylight. But in the darkness, Nightwish found the world came alive with vibrant song and merriment. All around him, the energy of the festival thrummed, spreading like wildfire among the people of Novus with just as much vigor. Bonfires leapt to life against the black sky, no clouds marring the beauty of the stars as they blinked and shone with silvered light upon the crowds. Children laughed, women danced, men whispering in appreciative tones about the show. And Nightwish scribbled furiously in his journal, taking everything in with the eye of a storyteller, trying to capture the spirit of the night in as many words as he could manage.
His mind worked faster than his pen, and though his concentration seems focused on the page, when his indigo eyes glance up, they meet those who stared with a twinkle of curiosity and pleasure. For his was in his element here, lost and anonymous in a sea of others, with no agenda but to let his whismy wander.
Summer wine tasted sweet on his lips, and as he brushes away the last bits of pastry crumb from his cheek, the blue and white stallion stretched and carefully tucked his journal away. For now, he needed more, to feel the press of warm bodies against his, lost in the shuffle of movement. He blends easily into the crowd, letting the music take him where it would guide him, an easy smile crossing his face as he murmurs greetings to the strangers who pass. This continues for some time, until the energy of the dancing leaves him breathless and tired, and as he turns from the business of the crowd, he stumbles into another.
“My apologies.” He smiles with a boyish charm, playful and carefree, his gaze shamelessly sizing the stranger up. “Didn’t see you there… what a night!” He sighs contentedly, shifting over with a slight bow to allow the other space to pass, before questioning, “What do you think of all this?”
and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.
Wrath has always been a fickle thing to her. Anger does not fester in her heart as her mother’s does until a wolf becomes a dragon. She does not spit, and froth, and turn her head from the mortals in fear of devouring them all. But while it does not fester, or turn to dragon in her heart, it lingers. Like a shadow at the bottom of the forest, like nothing more than a layer of dark on black, it lingers.
She tries not to hate the vibrancy of the quiet meadow with the bonfires sprinkled throughout the newborn blossoms and grasses. When she looks at the trees, haloed like gods in the firelight, she tries to see only something holy enough to live in her dreams. There is life here, she knows there is, but she cannot fully see it when it’s superimposed over all this death. And beneath her hooves a city of forgotten mice with forgotten worms in their rotten bellies start to rouse and whisper to her how wrong, wrong, wrong these creatures that inherited the world are.
Danaê thinks, not for the last time, that the forgotten mice have a hundred other worlds and an eon of things forgot to share with her.
Earlier she had not eaten pastry but grasses sweet with the sugar of spring. She slaked her thirst not with wine but soothed it belly deep in an offshoot of the rapax. The music had been a eulogy to spring instead of a sonnet to it when she pressed between the citizens of her city and danced. And if there had been a shadow in each of her steps, a memory of that lingering wrath and war, no one but a unicorn might have noticed it.
Her steps are still full of that lingering memory when the stallion bumps into her. In her bloody gaze there is, in the poppy color, a glimmer of ruby war instead of flower. Danaë smiles, softly enough that her aching teeth are nothing more than a suggestion of violence beneath the pearl softness of her. “It is different.” She whispers.
She tries not to smell the bitter tang of charred herbs lingering in the smoke caught in his mane. And when she sighs there is not contentment in it but a smear of dark on black.
ll around them, there is fevered energy and life. It thrums between bodies, real and flourishing, pulsing with a character that draws him in even as it pushes her away. Contrasts kept life interesting, the same way that two could stare at the sky – one seeing hope and one seeing only infinite vastness. "What do you see?” And the artist’s heart in him yearns to know, what the girl with ruby eyes would know about this place. For he longed to hear her observations, the rest of the world around them forgotten as the storyteller focuses on Danaê alone.
C
uriosity nags at the stallion as he steps away from the bustle of the crowd, finding a place just on the outside of the circle. Here, he is close enough to feel the heat of the fire, but far enough that quiet night sounds break through the din. Just beyond the trees, he can sense the eyes which watch, bright and hungry. They do not frighten Nightwish, but instead keep him sharp and aware. Knowing his surroundings and making sense of their secrets had fed fodder to the storyteller, the plotline around him building with every sideways glance or murmured word. So he does not miss the edge to Danaê’s whisper, even as his eyebrow cocks in inquisitive surprise.
"L
ook there…” He points to the shadows, where lovers steal kisses by the firelight, oblivious to those who watched, with eyes for only one another. "It seems he found his courage… she’s been making eyes in his direction all night…” He’d watched, merely as an observer of human behavior, curious to see how their story would play out. And now, he smiles before turning away, leaving the couple to their privacy and focusing back on his present company.
T
he unicorn mare was beautiful, if not a bit cold and aloof. It didn’t bother him though, as he falls into an easy quiet beside her, letting the world around them carry on for a while before resuming his small talk. "I am Nightwish – and you? Are you from here?”
and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.
Danaë wonders if he understands the secret language he has used to ask her to follow him outside the crowd. She wonders if he knows the danger of that language in the realm of mortal men with songs of love dying out in the shadows that start to nibble at their own as they walk. The sound of their hoof-steps reminds her, as he directs her gaze to the lovers (or almost-lovers) lingering in a dark corner, how easily things turn to something else when pointed out.
The weight of her gaze aches when she tries, and tries, and tries to see a moment as soft as the one he describes. But all she can see is the touch of flesh that has nothing to do with any hunger she can understand. She does not look at him when he looks away, she is still trying to discover the meaning in a world she has seen for the first time. “And what is it that she has found?” Her voice is a whisper, an echo as all her words are echoes of something else, that carries through her the dead dreams of a city full of mice and worms. Danaë does not care for whatever the stallion has found (because how, she thinks, is courage a thing to be found and lost instead of borne).
It is only when she looks at him again that she can see the beauty in his dark and bone coat, in the way he can smile as if the world is something fragile and lovely instead of wanting. The weight of her gaze tries to discover something in him, some other hint, that he truly understands the secret language. But she cannot find it when she says, “You can call me Danaë.” She presses her nose to his neck, and inhales in another sentence of that language.
Beneath the smoke and cedar and jasmine he smells like the mountain full of nightshade and snow. And when she opens her mouth again it is a wonder those stars Isolt pulled from her belly do not pour out. “Delumine is my home.” She inhales again. “I can smell the mountains on your skin. Where are you from Nightwish?” Her tail curls around his shadow like an embrace she does not know how to give in any language.
he storyteller is drawn to everything around him. He wants to know all there is to know, to see all there is to see. So where Danae can look at their world and see something which others cannot, or care not to notice, Nightwish sees what others see, but fail to pay attention to details on. They are not so unlike in this regard, though as he stands beside the unicorn, the male is struck by the ways they are different. “She can have him tonight, however she wants him… whether for a minute, an hour, a night. They can flicker as a quick burst of passion, or enjoy a slow burn. It is hers to decide…” for the male was captivated, a feeling he understood all too well – for Nightwish fell a little bit in love with every girl he met. There was just something about their sparkle, the way they smelled like summer rain, the way the light hit their curves. A romantic at heart, he cannot help but sigh as he muses over the thought.
"Danae.” He lets her name swirl on his tongue, exotic and beautiful, attention returning to only her as the rest of their surroundings seemed to fade to a slow din. He focuses on her words, as if clinging to her every suggestion, drawing them all in with active listening. I can smell the mountains on your skin… where are you from? He chuckles at her question, for it did not have a simple answer. And, in his artist’s flair, words become images as he paints his world for Danae.
“Your people would call me a vagabond, a nomad, though for now I find Denocte to my liking. I haven’t been here long…” He eases into a simple gait, gesturing for her to walk beside him. “Before this place, I was in a world of endless winter. It was said that the land was cursed by the gods, with the sun shining brightly but never melting the snow. For a thousand years, the curse would shroud the world in ice and winter, relentless and without respite. I wandered there, across the arctic tundra, kept warm by firelight and stories of times past – before the gods saw fit to curse that world.”
He paused for effect, turning to gaze upon her with a sparkle of adventure in his eye. "Would you believe it if I told you I ended up here, in ways which cannot be explained? If I simply fell asleep in one world, and woke up in the next – finding only a door in a dream, opening it to find myself in a castle with a thousand different doors, each leading to another world? That door led me to the castle, down the winding path, to an island… and then to Caligo’s mountains.”
It was as fantastical as any story he could spin… and yet, strangely, it was the truth (truly, sometimes stranger than fiction).
and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.
If there is a way for any mare, any mortal, to have a stallion caught between her lips, and fire, and a dark looming forest, she imagines there must be more beauty than terror in it. Her eyes wander again to the caught stallion and mare snared upon him like another caught thing. All she can see is the terror of it in the way that no matter how many times they kiss, or whisper in touches of hip and rib, they cannot see the hearts begging for freedom in their chests.
Danaë cannot see them lasting longer than a night nor can she see any poetry in the way any mortal might have another.
How ruinous a thing, she thinks, is desire. And for a moment, when he turns his back to her and gestures for her to walk, she thinks desire is not the only ruinous thing laying coiled in a black snake of rot beneath a mortal’s skin.
Her horn aches as the shadow of it falls into the darkness of his (it has wanted to run him through, and through, and through until the poetry on his tongue was only pollen and seed). But she tells it to be tame, be gentle, be a whisper and not at howl as she walks close enough that their shoulders might tap together occasionally like two rocks in the Rapax.
A twin, even one more made than born, does not know how to untangle herself from the roots and flowers of others. And so she tangles into him with a smile that whispers instead of howls and a hunger that buries itself into the garden of seeds curled into her belly. “For a cursed land,” she smiles to bite back the image of him with seeds and pollen instead of romanticism, “it sounds very golden and full of life.” She bites back the urge to ask him just how many perished in the winter with the gods watching from their mantles of power.
Her shoulder bumps his, feeling spring warmth instead of winter’s chill and something in her shatters for the ache of frost, and sleeping oaks, and ghostly shadows of branches. “I have believed stranger things in this world than a castle full of doors.” Their shoulders bump again when he looks at her with a gaze bright with a sense of something she cannot understand. What is adventure to him is only the desperation of hunger, and needing, and the wistfulness of a seed in the wind, to her.
“Tell me a story,” her steps falter as the firelight halos around his head and promises nothing of warmth to her, “of a time past that kept the chill from you.” And as unicorns do, she does not ask when she lays her lips against his cheeks and waits to feel the story as much as she waits to hear it.
here was more to Danaë than met the eye, this much he knew. But he could not know what darkness she hid behind her quiet observations – what else she wondered when speaking of the cold world from where he’d come. “There is a beauty to winter, yes… but it was an unrelenting thing, and many perished in the wake of the cold.” For a time, Nightwish himself had wondered if he would see the sun’s warmth again, waking each day with a tired feeling that it would go the same as the day before, and as the day which would follow. Only the stories had changed, growing wearier as his companions lost hope. He, for one, was glad to see summer coming to Novus, the spring days growing warmer every day.
He smiles a sad sort of smile at her question, one which waned nostalgic as he drew a breath to begin. "Once there was a man – an adventurer of sorts. He traveled the world in search of exotic things, of places which only legend had seen. He climbed the tallest mountains, searching for a fabled temple know only to an ancient cloister of monks. He wandered through the dense jungle, following a ratted treasure map which led to a cursed ruby, big as a grown man’s fist. He set sail on a seaswept voyage, guided only by the shining stars, to find an underwater civilization long lost by the tides of time… Nothing could tame the man’s explorer spirit – until he met a girl one night in a garden, fair as the summer moon. It is said that her beauty captured the man, that in the moment, she was the only thing that mattered to him. They shared what only lovers could know, giving everything to one another for a fleeting night of passion.
In the morning, he had vanished without a word, and she never saw him again. But he had warmed her with his tales of adventure, and had given her the greatest gift of all… the gift of new life.” He smiled then, lost in the romance of it all, understanding the wanderlust which pulled the man from the promise of love even as a piece of him mourned for what might have been. “She would tell me of his escapades, and as a boy on my mother’s knee, there was nothing I wanted more than to see the world. Some nights though, I wonder if he was more a knave than an voyager, for leaving us without a word.”
When he pauses, Nightwish finds the unicorn’s gaze, something unreadable in the depths of his eyes for only a moment, flickering softly in the firelight. “And you, Danaë… where is it you come from? Before Delumine, I mean… What is your story?”
and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.
Below her lips the story feels like a sentient thing. She can feel the ridges of his pauses like scales and she can count the feelings it blooms in her chest like bits of swallowed bone. Her thoughts turn the story into a memory full of wisteria, and lilies, and ghost pipes. In another place it would be more than thoughts, more than just the feel of that ruby caught between her teeth like a star. But when he pulls away, and turns to her with the story still dancing in his eyes like a creature curled below his soul (instead of one of word and count), she is not seeing him but a garden spread around her in the dead of winter.
Danaë wonders if she would be a ruby cursed or the summer moon hanging over wildflowers. And she wonders who he would be in a world in which she is neither unicorn or forest-god. Always, in every breath, she wonders.
Her tail curls around his shadows in an embrace her form does not know how to give, or want, or shape. “I hope you have seen the world you wanted to see as a child.” She does not have the mortality to ask if he has, or if she might help him. All she can do, all she can ever do, is count the echoes of his heart where they pulse below his throat and just above his eye. Her own mother had no stories of wonder, or love, or anything but answers to all the ways in which the threads of the world might be plucked as easily as the head of a flower from the corpse of it.
And she can see those threads moving slow as moon-shards where her tail has curled around his shadow.
“Delumine is my story. I will begin and end here I think.” Because for all the hunger of her mother, and that sharper need of her sister, Danaë does not want to pull the threads of more than a single world. Already her belly, her magic, her want and need, are full to bloating with each mouse and vole in her forest.
She has wolves and stags, bramblebears and wendigos, foxes and owls singing in the marrow of her bones so loudly she has forgotten what her own song might sound like. There is no room for stories of mothers and moons, or rubies, in each sharp puzzle piece of her.
A unicorn is no story, no tale. A unicorn is religion.
But she wonders how it might be to be something else. She wonders enough to pull her tail from his shadow like a blade from a chest. She wonders enough to open the gap between them so that the night might pour in incandescent instead of death.. She wonders enough to smile and dip her head to hide the softest blush of firelight from her cheek. And she wonders enough to say, “perhaps you might come find me in a garden underneath the summer moonlight,” as if he might find something there that is neither death, nor unicorn. As if she too might discover how to shape herself into the sound of a story instead of silence.
But whatever she might discover, whatever he might discover in the secrets of her, will not be tonight. For already the wolves, and foxes, and bears, are calling out for their salvation from the dirt. And as she always does, as she always will, Danaë races into the dark gloaming forest to find them.
hope you have seen the world you wanted to see as a child. He smiles, for there is still so much of the world he yearns to see. For all that he has seen, it’s never enough. He wants more – to see more, to experience more – to know more. Her story might be Delumine, but Novus was just one page in his. There was still so much unwritten, so he can do little more than sigh a whimsical sigh, wondering at what adventure might come next. And in a way, he feels a pang of pity for the mare, whose world seems so small compared to his (even if she seemed to enjoy the confines of Delumine).
“As you wish,” he whispers with a twinkle in his eye, knowing that he would find the unicorn again and would wonder what she’d add to her story in between their meetings. She whispers of gardens and of moonlight, and for a moment, Nightwish wonders if the romance of the night has cracked its way through her hard exterior. For nights like these were ripe with wonder, if only one were to reach out and grasp it in their fingers.
But then she goes, embracing the darkness once more, and the storyteller is helpless but to follow her with his curious gaze, wondering where it was that she ran to. And as he turns back to the bonfires and the spirits who danced around them, Nightwish wondered what stories he might scribble in his journal of their meeting, and what might come next in their story.
