widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
R
unning should not be so easy with a heart she cannot hear. It should not feel like every dead wolf, and fox, and hare, and stag, has slipped into her bones and made a graveyard out of her instead of a unicorn. Young legs should not be this quick, a spine this agile, her form sleeker than a sight hound on a blood-trail. She should not be--Her sinew stretches as her sister's does; her nostrils flare out their dragon fog as her sister's do; her horn catches in the dappled forest light in the same pattern. And yet, for each step Isolt takes, each drum of her heart that echoes the forest war-song in Danaë's ears, she cannot help but feel like it's only the forest chasing after Isolt with a mouth that does not know the ways in which to say, wait, wait, wait for me.
Over and over again she opens her mouth. And over and over nothing comes out. There is only another breath, another exhale of all the animals dead and slumbering in her thoughts. Perhaps that is all they need, this dream of air on a sea of blood, and organ, and bones that ring like hollow swamp drums. Perhaps it does not matter that she is so full of the dead there is no room, no room at all, for anything else. Isolt stops, and even in that, as she slides in beside her there is no unicorn intent in the movement-- there are only those dead wolves and stags.
“Yes.” She says.
The voice is not her own. It is the howl of a wolf in the dawn, the joyful yip of a fox with a hare in its mouth, the lament of a swan when it finds its mate on the shore with his neck broken and his heart on the loam like petals instead of organ tissue.
Beneath the ground the bones start to hum, and beg, and whisper a hundred half formed not-language dreams. Each sinks into her head like a thorn into an almost rotten fruit. Around the wolf, and the stag, and the fox with a hare in his mouth, she starts to bleed out.
Out into the ground. Out into the places where she is not unicorn but magic. Out into the shadow that hold the only real shape of her form. Out. Just Out.
“It wants to be more than free, sister.” The wolf touches her nose to the skin of blood-red unicorn. The hare brushes a satin ear against the cheek of that same unicorn. The stag drags his bone crown against another bone crown. Danaë (like the swan) does nothing, saying nothing, makes no sound as the dead fill her up and start to cry to the black magic running through her where blood should be be.
Help us. They cry to magic.
The magic whispers, hush, hush, hush, back to the fox, and the stag, and the wolf, and the swan. It whispers in the way that a rusted blade whispers against the fragile skin of a sacrificial lamb.
“It wants to live and run as things with hearts and dreams run.” The words pour from the mouth of the unicorn. The body blinks, and blinks, and the eyes turn as liquid bright as fresh blood from the wound. Teeth flash between her pale lips as she snarls, and smiles, and gnashes her teeth together like a trapped animal.
And when the first vine, fat with wisteria, lifts from the dirt there is a skull nested in the flowers (like a bone-white star pillowed in a storm cloud) with a femur laid across its brow like a dirty and forgotten crown.
{ @Isolt "speaks" notes: <3
