There is despair in the deadness of marble, and opal, and gold-leaf furling at the edges, and the unicorn understands the agony of it. It lives in the spirals of black, and silver, streaking through the whiteness like lighting through the sky. And if it lives as lighting in marble it lives in her too, like blood drops falling from the jaws of a fox onto the ivory belly of a winter hare.
Here, twisting between the guards and the bodies pretending to be stone as idols pretend to be false, she is nothing more than another frozen-in time artwork of a thing everyone is pretending to remember. Sometimes a stallion staggers around her with a garbled apology falling from his lips. Sometimes a mare shrieks at her when she blinks slowly as a cloud across the moon and turns her head at the racing echo of their mortal heart.
And she does not laugh at them as a child should (for she does not look or seem childish).
She only looks at them with a strange look that bellows as silently as a dead-clock; unicorn, unicorn, unicorn, and then, dead unicorn. And if there is a smile on her lips it is the lost look of a doe in the morning fog standing over the fawn she knew would die at the first kiss of winter. Or maybe it is more like the look of the wolf steeping in the bear den with his thoughts full of rabies, and need, and madness.
Or maybe it’s the look of the cub, the one right before it tucks itself down to sleep in the belly of that same mad, mad wolf. It does not know, as dead things never know, that there is nothing beyond the black slumber until a unicorn comes.
Whatever the look is, it carries itself bone heavy on her face as she stops at the marble outline of a horse racing towards war. She traces the outlines of his eyes-- wide rimmed, and bloody, and pitted with the whittled down knots of woods. There is misery in his eyes, and that same agony they unicorns understand the depths of, and a hundred whispering screams of the wood that died to become eyes in a hallway fat with stone.
The mad-look (cub-look, wolf-look, doe-look) waivers on her face like water down a mirror. The blade at the end of her tail whines against the marble as she drags it back-and-forth, back-and-forth, back-and-forth like a lion at the throat of the mad-wolf. Her look shifts. It changes. It becomes. It is made.
Danaë smiles, a marble unicorn’s smile, as vervain unfurls from the gone-to-war eyes of the stone statue.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
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09-15-2020, 08:04 PM
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tell me father,
what to ask forgiveness for:
what I am, or what I am not?
I don’t know where I learned that comparison is the death of self. The words seem likely to belong in a library, or a script, or even a prayer. Perhaps it was Hilde, who told me, in a moment of unexpected wisdom. I wish I knew, and I wish I knew how to believe it.
I walk in my father’s brilliant lack of shadow. I walk bathed in his brazen golden light, and know with a depth that exceeds the seas’:
I will never be him. I will never glow with Solis’s warmth, or so smoothly radiate compassion. He empathetically listens to his citizens when they approach; he compliments the Ieshans on their “party” and all along I drift dark and obscure where his shadow should be. He had invited us all here; I, and Hilde, and Mother. They must be elsewhere, and I--
Well, I cling to him.
I cling to him as a shipwrecked sailor to jetsam.
There is a man that approaches, and Ariel too; and my father is whisked away with a bright, too-bright, smile. He says, “I will not be long; stay near the garden of statues, and I will find you.”
My father is gone before I can agree; Ariel lingers for a moment, appraising me with those unnerving feline eyes. I cannot look away.
And then the lion is gone, too. I am alone, but follow the Sovereign’s instructions with the devoutness of a priest: I walk to the garden of statues, where the festivities are silent for now, and look out across the dark marble. I have never seen artwork like it; it makes my mouth dry, and stirs a feeling I do not recognize.
Or perhaps the feeling is one I have suppressed all along, tonight. The Terrastellan monks tell me, Vespera has given you powerful magic, young prince. You must not let your emotions get the best of you, or--
The air around me glows red. My mouth tastes like salt. I can feel the thrumming energy of the party; and the effect is nearly dizzying. There is so much noise, but it is all within me, it is the flow of things I cannot control. All around me the air is full of it, of high highs and low lows. I can never distinguish the emotions of the energies: only the flow of positive and negative, always through me, always--
Overwhelming.
I am breathing hard by the time I reach the end of the statues. The corridor they make looms above my small frame; there are crashing stallions, mares like Aphrodite, monsters of myth--they clash with lamplight and stars, made in stark white marble against the darkness all around. As I walk beneath, the red light of my energy casts them into even deeper contrast. Jagged smears of light accent their immortalized features, and--
It is, perhaps, a little quieter here, beneath their impassive stares. I close my eyes for a moment, and am alone; this is where I may meditate, as the monks suggest. I can ground myself, before my magic overcomes me--
but in the quiet, with my light turning back to something radiant and bright, I feel an energy like that of a black hole. It happens so quickly I am already a conduit; I am already falling in. My eyes snap open, and I see her now where I should have seen her before: I had mistaken her for one of the many sculptures. But no, she is--she is a girl, and a unicorn, with a scythe-like tail dragging the marble floor below.
The sound is one I have never heard before.
The sound is one that chills me to the bone. I am glancing at flowers; and wondering why my stomach twists and flies. A girl, a girl--but there is something about her more clamorous than all the partygoers beyond, something that opens with all the discord of the night sky if it were to explode.
She is smiling at the flowers in the eyes of the statue.
I am red, red, red. I want to make something; the energy within me is clamourous too, is explosion and the sound of the big bang in silence, the fire and elements and--
When the silence between blade, and marble, and unfurling petal is broken it becomes indignant in the shattering. The unicorn, still blinking to the sound of a dead and crying clock, feels that same shattering rage bloom in her chest. Inside her the indignant silence opens its bloody jaws wide enough that a lion crawls out from the belly of it.
She turns and each flower, each deadly petal, unfurls towards the boy as she does. A breeze whispers through the windows, and whistles through the dead-stones, and gathers along the dip of her spine like snow and satin. It feels like a gathering storm, a potential weight of something either profane, or monstrous, or too perfect and fragile to touch. She feels like thunder in that eclectic gathering (she feels like all the things her mother has warned her of becoming).
And she breaks inside the feelings like a shard of glass in the tide of it, rolling over and over until her edges are not made blunt but sharper. She becomes steel and hunger as much as she becomes a flower wanting only for the sun and rain.
His voice breaks and the thunder in her bones knows instinctively the rightness of it. The world will break for you, unicorn. Her mother had told her once; it was always unicorn and not Danaë. And she did not understand why she had to break anything at all.
But she understands now, as she steps from the knotted, rotten gaze towards him.
And even as she understands she cannot help this urge to weave winter jasmine between the gaps in his teeth to stitch his voice back together. What else might she grow in the divots behind his eyes then, when she might turn her attention to things other than the sound of him? Her steps bring a blooming to another statue’s gaze and they unfurl towards the boy as well.
The unicorn, who is still the unicorn, does not smile as she traces the youth in his form. To her it is still strange to see innocence look as it should, long legged and fragile enough to crack open like a lost shell she found once in the river. And even though she never possessed the innocence of true-born things, she longs for it like a petal for the stolen noon when the snow is too thick to melt.
She misses that which she never had even though she does not know the exact shape of whatever it is she is longing for.
“Hello.” The sound of her voice echoes his, exact but for the wholeness of it, as if he had howled instead of spoken. She moves closer still, close enough to count the different spectrums of color in the echo of his form.
And the unicorn wonders, as things that howl do, if his red tastes like blood or like the dawn on a hazy sky.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
tell me father,
what to ask forgiveness for:
what I am, or what I am not?
So close to her, he can smell something sickly sweet, almost like rot—but sweeter, sweeter, like flowers left to ferment. The smell is gone so quickly Aeneas does not know if it had been real at all, and then—
She is bright and gaunt and like nothing he has ever seen before. Marveling is not the right word. He looks at her as the sparrow does the snake; enchanted.
If she is a unicorn is made of shattered rage, lions, death, and flowers—then the young pegasus is the dying thing, shocked at its own death. He is the fawn, new to the world, at the bloodied chaws of the wolf. He is sacrificial innocence—doves and lambs and white surrender flags shot to bits in their raising. The true tragedy is that all of these things, Aeneas included, are just a little in love with their destruction.
A martyr would not be so beautiful without the tragedy; a lamb upon the sacrificial alter not so worthy, if not for the pureness of that virgin throat. Perhaps that is why he smiles against the electric undercurrent of their meeting—perhaps that it is why he smiles, despite the way she carries all the pressurized air of the storms wrought by the sea.
If she understands why she must break, then Aeneas understands why he must be broken. Why there must be lambs at the jaws of wolves. Why innocence is so sacred because it can never last.
“I’m Aeneas,” he says to her, as her voice echos across the marble. He speaks so quickly after, their voices meld for a moment in a symphonic echo--aeneas and hello hello hello They are eye-to-eye, and perhaps he is a fool for thinking she is not so different from him, that they are both children in a world of turmoil, politics, adults—and this is what makes his smile so boyishly sweet, and shy, and even as his energy dances chaotically around him (is it lightening? turning gold at the edges?)—
“Who are you?”
He wants to know.
He needs to know; and that smile is shier now, crooked, his eyes hooded with all the hopes of a boy who has not yet learned that in the story of the lion and the lamb, the lamb cannot survive.
A pegasus, this pegasus, tastes like flying. In the echo of him, where his aurora is superimposed upon the very marrow of this frail coil, she can taste the cosmic salt of eons. Her made blood turns cacophonous as a pack of lions at the echo his flavor. In her smile, her teeth grind against each other like whetstones and daggers. Hunger, and want, and something like need, scrape claws against her liver.
Somewhere a jackal yips at the moon. Somewhere her sister lays her teeth to that same jackals mouth and demands silence instead of life. Somewhere, below the hunger and need, her heart still wants to stitch the salt of his magic back into the sea.
She could grow weeds out of the loam between a single word of his and the next.
And she steps closer, with her flower faces crawling down the gaunt cheeks of marble, because she wants to cry at the sting of his salt. She calls down the darkness of her eyelids because it aches to be so near the brightness of his innocence-- all blinding like the pelt of a lamb in the midsummer black.
“I am...” A sigh, a whisper, a bray of a lone wolf in the dead-moon. Her bloody eyes open and catch like a wish-seed in the brightness of his edges where they bleed like a wound cut into the coil. And she stumbles in that silence, where his energy catches in the cracks of her almost snarl, because he tastes--
Oh he tastes--
“Danaë.” Like life. Like fragility. Like the first furl of a rose coated in dew by the sea. Her name seems frailer than all of that in the wake of his lightning.
And she pulls that same lightning, that same gold, between her teeth like a thread. She follows it, inch by inch by inch, until she can count the shards of silver stars in his eyes. Against his cheek her own is pale as death (she needs no bit between her teeth to take his life from him) when she presses it to the darkness of his. By color alone, she knows that she is made to be the crack between the chambers of his heart, like an insidious weed cracks open a rose.
Her horn brushes the shell of his ear. “If I told you to run,” she whispers between the touch of weapon and lamb pelt, “would you?” The tip of her horn repeats the motion.
And in every eye, in every gap-jawed statute, a rose unfurls pale and innocent and perfect.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
tell me father,
what to ask forgiveness for:
what I am, or what I am not?
She is all things real, earthly; he feels it, in the way she makes the flowers grow and the space between them dissipate. There might be a day when Aeneas remembers this meeting in the garden of marble statues; there might be a day when he thinks back to this moment, and he acknowledges it as a transition, as the moment he realizes that he is both a boy and a star and an exploding sun, a forgotten planet, a black hole aching and aching and aching to be filled—
She makes him feel that, in the unnerving measure of her eyes and the way she is not light or dark but a strange sort of hunger; he feels it like the absence of positive energy or negative energy, like the growth of something neutral, indifferent, and yet—it is wanting, he knows, and that wanting opens up within him a need to fill, a need to—
“Danaë.” Aeneas breathes, and the light gold of his glowing marks illuminates them both. He has never been touched by someone outside of his family, he thinks; it is colder than he expects, her cheek against his own, and he closes his eyes.
Yes—
Sometimes, light is just meant to illuminate the dark. His wings flutter uselessly at his shoulders, reminding him, you too are magic. Aeneas opens his eyes; his smile has faltered, but it is only because he does not have a way to express the building thing within him, a thing like light—she is asking him a question, and to his mind it does not, at first, make sense.
In childhood’s naïveté, Aeneas turns away in wonder to admire the roses as they unfurl. Her horn is only a unicorn’s horn against him, just as when he steps aside his pegasus feathers are only feathers against her—or so he thinks, ignorant to weapons, ignorant to death (beside the death of space, the death of cosmos, the death of disappearance—)
He turns to glance at her with a smile renewed. “Only,” he promises. “If you came with me, Danaë.” And her name is a rose, too, unfurling in his mouth. It seems wrong to glance at her magic and say aloud, If only I could create such things!
Instead, Aeneas takes a breath, having forgotten his earlier negativity and angst. He glances over the edge of the balcony, beyond the statues, toward a night sky shattered by silver stars.
When he glances back, it is to construct them overhead with a flash of radiant silver-gold energy. The stars are among them, and when he flutters his wings, he dusts her. “Why would you tell me to run?” he asks, not understanding.
Because, after all, that is the way of innocent things.
The way of the fawn underfoot the wolf, not even having yet learned to quiver in fear.
The unicorn follows the pegasus’s gaze in the silence that echoes in the absence of her answer. Her eyes glaze over the moon and the pale stars flickering so quickly towards a death she already knows the taste and sound of. Their stories echo through her heart as nothing more than echoes of wishes and whispers-- just as all dead and dying things echo.
And when her heart stumbles in her chest, and shifts to the melancholy sound of his, she knows that her body can make an echo of a dying thing. An echo-- just an echo, echo, echo, and nothing else.
An echo. She steps beneath his wings like a lamb beneath a teat, all pale white and tender to the touch.
Another echo. Her gaze sees not a star in the moon, or a mother, but an eye. It blinks at her through the eyelid clouds.
Echo. Echo. Echo.
He dusts her skin, beneath the false cosmos of boys pretending to be god, and she glitters like bones coated in bloody diamonds. She wonders if she looks like sin, or savior, or a black and ore gate waiting to be unlocked. She wonders if this is what it feels like to be beautiful-- like the way snakes feel curled up on a sunny rock with a dissolving rat screaming in their bellies. She wonders if he thinks she is beautiful when she looks up into his canopy of wings and stars and eats a dead-wish from his sky.
A rose falls down a marble cheek like a tear and somehow that sound, that wilting whisper of earth and stone, is louder than the swallowing of his star down her throat. And that sound, that whisper, recalls her into some dark purpose that her marrow had hidden in the mortal echo of his heart as for a moment (just a moment) she had pretended to be something that a unicorn simply cannot be.
“If I came with you Aeneas,” each word she feels in her bones the same way the marble had felt the falling of the rose, “your heart would run with me instead of with you.” She steps deeper into his stardust as a thing recalled to its purpose. Another blood red bloom paints streaks of pollen down a glittering, stony cheek.
“Do you understand?” The unicorn, now just a unicorn, asks as she lays her tailblade kiss soft against his throat. And this time the falling tear is not a flower but a drop of water and salt rolling down the bone-pale lines of her own death-cold cheek.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
tell me father,
what to ask forgiveness for:
what I am, or what I am not?
Whatever has been building, whatever strange tension or knowledge, has reached its pinnacle.
If she is all things of earth, then Aeneas is of the stars.
That is the only kind of dying he knows. The end of galaxies; the collapse of a supernova; a black hole, bottomless in its hunger. Silent ends. Nearly incomprehensible ends, in the form of quiet deaths. In their magnitude, they are made distant. They exist only in his sensitive connection to stars, to sun, to the energy between all things. The energy that threads itself, delicately, between them now.
Aeneas is not thinking of beauty, or innocence, or sin. He is thinking of that pulsating thread; the thread of magic; the thread of connection; the way her questions to herself manifest, in him, as a simple neutrality. With each flower created in the eyes of a statue, his heart leaps. There is no aching abyss; no unforgivable, too-hot sun. Aeneas is not thinking of what she looks like; only the attraction to what is beneath, the current he feels like a heartbeat, an energy he has never before met.
If I came with you, Aeneas, your heart would run with me instead of with you. She has stepped through his false stardust and into him; the scythe she wears as a birthright kisses, without smarting, his throat. Do you understand?
Aeneas, an optimist, a dreamer.
Aeneas, prideful, fierce, detached.
“No,” Aeneas whispers, as softly as her blade touches him. “No, because my heart does not run, flower girl. It flies.”
(But, Aeneas does know. He knows it in the quiet threat of her weapon, in her spiraled horn; he understands it, inherently, in the pooled-blood color of her ruby eyes. He simply refuses to believe it).
He stands regarding her eye-to-eye. With a flick of his telekinesis, he removes the tear from her cheek. “You can come with me anytime you would like, Danaë.”
Is it brave, he wonders, to regard a thing he cannot understand and to refuse to fear it?
It feels brave, Aeneas thinks.
"My parents will be looking for me," he says, almost apologetically. But Aeneas lingers for a moment longer and turns away only after casting, with his luminous magic, a small galaxy above her.
(But look closely, Danaë--look how each of your flowers wilted when the light was born).
She remembers, as she watches the glitz of a false galaxy fall on her cheeks, a story the library keeper had told her once. The fire had been a warm halo at her back and a silken pillow a reminder that there still were gentle things left in the world for no reason other than comfort and beauty. Outside the moon was a low-red sickle, like a wound in the sky, and a dragon had curled up in her hollow darkness. And inside Danaë had listened, as she always listens to the keeper, to the tale of a star chewed out from the sky.
He had told her of the ways the blood of that chewed out star still walks among them in silver-eyed mortals. She had listened raptly as she learned about their blood so diluted that it might be water and dusty silver instead of molten silver. And she had wondered of the ways a watered down star, or galaxies, or dregs a moon might be better off dead.
At least if they were dead they could have become a garden, or a roving sculpture of art with a spore heart, instead of a story in a book remembered only by the keeper and her.
She’s thinking about how death can be beautiful watered in the belly of a star, and how a comet might still be beautiful with a waterfall tail of orchids and ferns long after its fire has burned out. Surely, she thinks, orchids and ferns will still allow it to fly.
And if the comet could not fly, or blaze, or do anything but rest inside her mind and slumber, she would not love it any less.
She would not love him any less.
He steps away, just as she hoped he would. It is always so dangerous, so foolish, to brush the tear from a unicorn and seem like a hero defeating some grand monster. But when casts a small universe above her head like a gifted crown, she wonders how he can see a maiden when on her tongue there still lingers the taste of his heart. Danaë tries to feel regret when she watches him go, knowing with an immortal’s knowing, that someday he would run with her even if he dreamed of flight.
Surely, she thinks, wings of cypress saplings and laupaku leaves would still be able to fly.
Her tailblade aches when it falls forgotten to the marble and every rose, every stem, falls to the floor like the tears of every frozen statue left to rot in a marble hallway of wealth.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
