widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
D
anaë does not know that her song, the one echoing in scripture through her holy heart, is a killing sonnet. She does not know that it is not hope, or joy, or freedom taking flight like a sparrow in her chest. The humming vibration on her lips is not prayer but eulogy and she does not know it. She is too made, too grown like a weed in the dry season, to know that there is nothing kind in the hummingbird flutter of her heart. To her, to a new-made unicorn, there is only the sparrow in her chest and not the sun-charred bones of its corpse. There is only the song in her hooves, in their hooves, cracking through the snow like wounds instead of weapons. There is only the crashing of the stag’s fear breaking up the song, the silence of their hunger, like waves on the immortal and immoral shore of them.
But had she known the terror of her form, her joy, her melody, she might have closed her eyes and sobbed.
She would have sobbed and then she would have still laid her teeth at his throat while her sister tore off his horns.
Danaë would have, she would have done it all, because she does not know how to do anything else but sing, and sing, and scream of death.
Their hooves continue their race, and the stag continues the last of his breaths, and the snow continues to pool in her spine like she’s branch instead of flesh. Her legs stretch, and burn, and grow, as she tries to tell her body to run fast, to be predator instead of child, god instead of unicorn. The stag stumbles (his first of many) and her heart leaps at the fear rising in the musk of his scent. It bellows a roar that her heart calls a hallelujah.
The stag stumbles again. She quickens, and grows, and opens her mouth to howl, howl, howl at the creatures racing away from all the places in which their shadows fall. Somewhere her heart sets into the idea of sorrow, like a sun at the horizon.
Somewhere she feels broken in all the ways a unicorn never is.
But when the stag stumbles for a third time she pauses on the corpse of a mighty oak and lifts one hoof into the air like a lion at a watering hole. Her heart flutters again in her chest and her lungs tremble on an exhale of winter. The point of her horn twists towards the jugular of that stumbling beast like a divining rod.
She is evolution in that pause.
And that is the only way in which she knows to ask Isolt to save her from her own torment that she still thinks is nothing more than song, or religion, or right.
{ @Isolt "speaks" notes: <3
