If she finds the feel of perishable flesh beneath her lips anything but beautiful she does not give away the secret of it. Her lungs and the spaces between her teeth are too full of star-breath and star-stuff to hold anything else but this weight of memory and the sweetness of the perishable. When her eyes fall over the cheek of the living, and the pearls of the dead, she tucks not one but two memories into the marrow of her wanting, aching bones (the ones that do not know how to be full).
Her tailblade draws lines behind her as her look waivers between unicorn, mother, and spire of smoke made from ash. She hums in the echoing toll of her sigh because this, this signing and carrying of dead things, is easier than shaping her insides into language.
Another sigh. Another hum. “Who did you prefer being?” Her eyes drift again, over a wing, a horn, and settle on the smoke spires and the whittled down bones. At her back, below the sickle point of her twitching tail, a pair of lilies blooms. And this time when she inhales it’s with the flavor of dead-stars, and newborn lilies, and girl-who-died, on her tongue like cloves and anise.
Her own name is dead in the silence. She is too full of other things to remember the shapes her tongue must make to say it.
And so it is a nameless unicorn that steps forward and around the living girl and her dead memory. Shivers race electric across her shoulders when she brushes up against feathers instead of skin. Behind her pale lips her teeth, her tongue, her throat, set to aching as if she’s become a bear in the middle of winter. Lilies follow her in bundles of blooms upon the bones of a universe. They die after shadow passes.
“I know what this place is.” Dust catches in her nose as she drags her lips across a star-corpse. Images waiver in the bones-- stags, and wolves, and foxes with limp quails in their jaws. Vines drag one image to the next and wisteria wipes away the echo of it. A star flashes across the mirror like a swan falling dead from the sky (blazing white to black ash). “It is a graveyard.” Her lilies turn to poppies, bright and bloody as she is pale. And when she turns her eyes toward the mare and they blink, blink, blink as the images in the bones do, there is a certain bloodiness lingering there too.
She pauses, the nameless thing caught in the memory of bones, with one hoof paused in the air like a hunting lion. Her lungs stutter in her chest as her heart forgets (as she has forgotten her name) the way that it should thunder in a faint metronome. “But I do not know what it was.” That paused hoof falls and it is thunder in the distant reality beyond this dark, gloaming world. “Do you?” And the dark ghost that runs across her eyes suggests that what was does not matter to her as much as the dying of it does.
Another lily unfurls above a frail seedling of a crimson poppy.
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