Flesh, even ruined and cold, is still flesh. There is still the fodder for the roots and the worms in the hallways of sinew and the twisted maplines of blood. Flesh, no matter the rot and ruin, is still the thing upon which a forest feeds and feasts. And that, the forests full of woe-eyed does and clever-eyed foxes, is the domain of unicorns.
Danaë knows it, as well as she knows the way in which her weapon crown tangles with her sister’s, and so she wonders of the ways this graveyard of dead stars and icy glass sings so sweetly to her. Each beat of their hearts, pale echoes of the still hearts upon which they stand, echoes like a symphony of roars in her soul. She whittles the bones down with her tailblade just to hear the roars turn to sobs.
The pegasus is a still thing, a strange thing, to turn away so easily from the scars of death and the dead-seeing look of pearl eyes. Danaë cannot look away, not when the smoke spires rise like the horns of the earth towards the organs waiting in the warm belly of the sky. It is her first look of war, of things made by the wreckage of mortals and immortals born, and she cannot (will not) look away.
“If you have to ask,” she says in a whisper thin and twisted as a thorn vine around her horn, “the lovely things are not for you.” Her look, a thing learned in the rotten womb of her mother, brightens as a jugular in the air and not as a sickle moon in the darkness should. Her hooves thunder as distant and winter-weak does when she steps closer. The melody of her heart quickens into a song of wood frogs in a vernal pool.
A star whispers to her of its dream that lay dead and cold in the glass bones of it. It whispers of fire, and darkness, and a cold so deep that it steals the breath from her lungs when she thinks of it.
Her breath is still a stuttering note in her chest, her heart that wood frog song, her tail a sob, when she reaches her nose out with the air of stars exhaling through her throat. “Who are you?” The words seem almost half formed on her tongue as the language of mortals often sounds on the lips of gods.
Her shadow, a reflection instead of darkness, waivers like a shark beneath the black sea when she touches her star-breath lips to the cheek of the girl who cannot see as a unicorn does. And beyond them the pearl eyes still do not blink as they fathom the endless universe.
Danaë blinks.
And she sighs.
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