widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
A
million instincts of the marrow, an infinite knowing, a tremor of fever need all settle into her heart like a tumor. There it grows roots and gathers children close with a promise of immortality. It sings as her heart has learned how to sing and it thunders like a storm is forever roaring. Her tongue tastes the blood of the girl and the fermented sweetness of her sister’s decay. A tremor settles into the curl of her heart-vein as it flutters against her jawbone. There just below the girl's eye is a tear-duct that might be convinced to weep blood instead of sorrow. Beneath her young jaw there flutters another heart-veins that might settle the tremor in Danaë’s like a stone to a weed. At the corner of her lips there is a fold of flesh that is ripe for the thread of a vine and the knot of a root.
Danaë grits her teeth, viciously hard, against the urge to step closer as the child does and dig deeper as the child begs for a hundred things a unicorn is made to know. And she thinks that her sister has the right of it, to rip the trees out by their roots to free the dead-things below it and pull the roots out by their buds so that they cannot discover the pain of spring and the pain of hibernation again. She thinks this girl, with her snow-dusted and pale lips, might be saved the pain of the knowing and the tremor of rotten need left in the wake of knowledge.
“You are wrong.” she says as she licks the lingering tang of copper from the air caught in her teeth. Her heart, her magic, her rot, thrills at the taste like a sparrow at a storm wind. She wants to snarl as her sister does. She wants to howl like the wolf in the ground. She wants to feast and rend and ruin.
She wants---
“I will give you a rose instead of a heart if you want to be taken to the dead.” A snarl trembles behind her smile because the dead belong to unicorns and not to horses. And she gnashes her teeth at the thought of giving them to anything else but flowers, and rot, and her sister.
It’s into her sister that she leans as she draws her horn from the girl’s flesh. She looks longingly as the drop of blood that falls from it like rainwater toward the seeds slumbering beneath the inches of snow. And she starts to think of the hare beneath the snow instead of the girl begging to be dead.
Because the dying of things is Isolt’s domain and not her own.
{ @Isolt @Elliana "speaks" notes: <3
