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.
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