There is a river running through the heart of the city in currents of silver and gold. Horses pause in their explorations and conquerings to slake their belly-of-the-island thirst. They drink, and drink, and drink, until their lips are dripping silver instead of mortal language. They smile and all their teeth turn to stars caught in the black cosmic gravity of their lips.
Danaë knows the river is not water. No water is so silver, so metallic, so shining in the blinking eyes and the sun. Only blood can be the color of light. Only the blood of dead stars is so bright.
Or maybe the blood of gods.
And she is thirsty, so thirsty that her throat feels like the desert her father has told her stories of. She is as parched as her mother for it, as starved as Eligos in the middle of winter, as ravenous as her sister. Her mouth waters like a fox as she watches the mortals smile their star-blood smiles and laugh until star-blood spit is falling from their lips like sorrow.
She wants to join them, to spit her sorrow and her stardust and laugh as she drinks down death.
Instead she pauses at the crying shop with walls that weep that same silver-blood and tremble in a cacophony of agony that her horn sings right back in lines of wood slivers running in lines straighter than the horizon. She digs, and digs, and digs, with both her blades until the floor is flooded up to her ankles with silver-blood that anyone else but her might call tears, or water, or rain in the belly of the island.
Danaë knows better.
Somewhere she can hear the snarl of Eligos and the screech of the beginning of her mother's war. Somewhere her sister is carving out her own agony, her own war, her own thirst in the city. Somewhere horses are laughing with their mouths full of blood.
And Danaë, who still knows better, keeps trying to carve out the sorrow of the sobbing and weeping shop. Even when the sorrow rises up to her knees---
She does not stop.
@Ipomoea
