and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.
Denocte’s stories are nothing like the one she’s found buried in the old librarian's heart. There are no Eira in the stories here, no deathless, no unicorns running between the birch like ghosts. But when the fire crackles with a bit of magic and shoots stars from the embers she finds herself watching the brightness instead of a gull picking at a crab in the distant tide.
With her father beside her it is easy to see the wonder in the world instead of the hunger of it.
The thunder left in the wake of the god’s rage, when he tossed his sword into the tide, found itself a new home in the belly of the sea. There all the whales, and sharks, and coral reefs started to eat away at the edges of the thunder. They ate, and ate, and ate until through their bodies, as they all died, the thunder spread until it was in every molecule of the sea. It was in the water-creatures and the sea-weeds. It was in the dolphin’s hearts as they crested over the waves like shooting stars.
It is not its own rage that the sea roars with and if you put a conch shell to you ear and listen closely, and stay very quiet as it whispers, you might hear the story of how the rage of a god poisoned the whole sea: for the sea, back in the beginning of time, had wanted to be gentle.
The crowd falls silent as the story-teller tosses his last bit of magic into the fire. In their awed breaths Danaë cannot hear sorrow but wonder, magic instead of a heartbreak, rejoice instead of lament. And she wonders if this is what it means to be immortal, to be as made as the god in the story. She wonders if it means that someday every ounce of her rage, and hunger, and sleepy want of death, will infect the entire world.
Beneath her cheek her father’s shoulder is warm, sun-warm even in the dead of night, and she leans hard enough against him that she can feel the bones of his shoulder meeting those of her jaw. “Do you think,” she whispers into his mane, “that someday a mortal will press their ears to a owl’s nest in a great pine and hear the story of me instead of the story of the tree?” And she thinks that there might be a terrible secret in some dark hole of her heart when the question does not make her feel sorrow, or lament.
All she can feel is a rejoice that the forest (someday) would love her enough to hold some part of her, even a part as small as her sound, in a chewed out hole full of life.
Because that is what she hears in the steady lub-dub of her father’s blood and magic when she presses her ear against his ribs.
ometimes it seems to him as if all of Novus is only a lost story he has found in the library, a half-forgotten litany on the lips of a Denoctian storyteller. When the man tosses the first bone into the flames (and oh! how the flames roared to taste it, and the crowd ahh’d to see it, and his own heart thrummed in time with it), he can think only of the people who might one day read it.
Each word feels weighted, sinking like stones down his throat when he swallows the story. Smoke lingers on his tongue, moving in a pattern that he wants to learn through his lungs. It tastes like a memory, like remembering, like it always has. And Ipomoea is still looking at each set of eyes leaning in around the fire, is still searching for that shine of blood wetting the story teller's teeth. He's looking for that thing that makes him feel more like a self-righteous god and less like a hateful one, that thing to justify that stain blossoming like a flower m his own heart.
A part of him thinks that his soul will always recognize it no matter which story it hides in. That something deep in him draped in robes of red will always blink awake at whispered violence.
Even now he can feel it begging.
But at the feel of Danaë's check pressed tightly to his shoulder, tightly enough that he can feel her teeth at his bones, he swallows it down. Forget-me-nots start to bloom around them, turned red and gold by the firelight. And Ipomoea who is still swallowing down the endlessness of the story thinks they look better this way.
He smiles, and feels a little more of his rage wither inside of his chest like a fire burning down to its embers. When he turns his head to lay his lips against Danaë’s brow his teeth catch brightly on the firelight. “Yes.” The truth of it is written there in her silhouette, in the shape of a unicorn made both sharp and soft. And Ipomoea does not need to hear the forest echo back the lyrics of their ancient song to her to know that she was made as much for the trees as they were made for her.
“What story would you have them tell the mortal?” He does not turn back to the fire when the Denoctian entertainer tosses the last of their magic like an offering to the flames. And the notes of that story, of the god’s thunder and rage and the sword he tossed into the tide, and the way his heart had sped up like he was that god —
all of it fades away like the ending of a song when he looks at his daughter and wonders which song she will sing in the wake of it (of him.)
and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.
She has never been asked for a story, never asked to learn the taste of it as it rises like sugar instead of bile from her throat. The only things she knows about stories is the way they sing. She knows how they crackle in the echo of a fireplace. She knows how they purr like lion cubs when they bed down in the garden of her liver. There are a hundred stories buried away like corpses in her, a hundred roots woven in their endings, but none of them have grown there. Each of those stories, each of those secrets, had been consumed instead of watered. They had flowered not by way of sun but by way of blood.
But the seeds of one are watered by the look in her father’s eye when he asks her for one. She inhales and the seeds turn to seedlings. And when she exhales it is not with a mouthful of flowers but with one full of her own secret, her own purring lion cub, her own garden hanging from her gums where teeth should be.
She tries not to choke on the roots of it as she begins.
“There was a unicorn we once knew, or at least we thought she was a unicorn the first time we saw her.” In her voice there is no Danaë, no made girl. Her voice only carries roots, and buried foxes, and the low howl of the wind rustling through a millions leaves to make them sing, and sing, and sing. “She has been caught in the tangled net of our shadows while trying to chase a silver-ray of moonlight through the belly of the forest. A net of darkness had caught itself on her horn and begged her to linger, to stay, to stop hunting and grow roots instead of hunger. At first we had thought she might pull us out root, by root, and leaf by leaf, when the red of her eyes turned to ruby-stone. Surely, we thought, we were all fools for tossing a net upon the horn of death and asking her to stay.” When she blinks a forest blinks with her, lines and lines of birch trees in the sunset breaking up her bloody gaze. She exhales the ocean brine of the night court so that she has nothing of the sea in her garden when she lays her head against her father once more.
Beneath her father’s skin she can still hear the lub-dub, lub-dub of life growing in a frozen forest and a dusty, dead desert. “But as she laid her cheek against our bark, and her hip against our thick roots bursting from the ground, we could not feel the weight of her as we felt the winter. We realized she was not a unicorn, or death, or a thing made of flesh and bone. She was a ghost, a ghost of our seeds that never broke from the ground. She was a ghost of every egg that fell from a nest hidden in our branches, and the corpses of every owl, fox, and mouse, that stayed a newborn in the places where our insides had been hollowed out.” Danaë does not lift her ear from her father’s ribcage when she opens her eyes and blinks away the lines of birch shadows in the red light glow of fire.
“I think the hollowed up tree would tell the mortal that the ghost carried every seed and every fallen tree in her stomach like a fallen star. I think the forest would tell the mortal that it would never die, never wilt, never fade, until every god was buried in the dirt of it or swallowed up by its ghost. And then I think it would tell the mortal to close their eyes and wish.” And she discovers, as the echo of her own voice becomes free of wind, and root, and fox, that she too knows how to sing like a story.
Danaë, in that realm between unicorn and ghost, had wondered.
