She knows there is a fire in her horn, a pyre of it on which some-thing she cannot name burns. Across the sight of the golden forest, and the smoke pillars of war, and the poppies making promises she cannot see it. But she knows it is there-- she can feel it like a heart that has crawled its way free from her chest by way of vine and thorn.
She is a unicorn aflame, a pyre of her own, a graveyard full of eternal flames that burn in the dead of winter.
And she turns those bloody, inferno eyes to the graveyard and the girl. All she can see is fire, and fire, and dead-wood, and nothing else but things so frail and mortal that they can do nothing else but burn. Like a god she wonders, as she tucks her nose back onto the star bones (in a way that is almost motherly) what she might shape the world into after it’s decaying around her in gardens and black, and moss, and lichen.
It will worship her, she knows, but she wonders what it will think when the world discovers that the only sound it knows how to make is that drumming warsong of her made heart.
“Will you let me know,” she starts with an ache in her cheek when it leaves the bone mirrors, “when you discover which?” And she knows, when she blinks her eyes into the juxtaposed image of an etched upon rib, that she already knows which one she would prefer being. But unicorns have always known their own hearts, their own soul, their own grotesque hungers, and she tries not to blame the mortal for her ignorance.
Her eyes close on the image of starlings, and sparrows, and wings dripping ash like wish-fat stars as they beat like a heart. Each organ in her form trembles and flutters like a pair of wings divided. The fire in her horn spits embers and sparks in the same way her mother’s smile spits blood and furry.
When she opens her eyes, on a sigh that sounds like those same wish-fat stars falling, she smiles because she does not know anything else to do that does not have her laying her teeth against the mortal’s throat in a holy kiss. “When they burned what did your starlings become?” She steps closer. Her belly swallows the same smoldering flame living in the curls of her horn. “Did you stop to wonder at all?” And this time, when she blinks and opens her eyes again it’s not a carved rib flashing across her eyelids in strobelight.
It’s a reflection of her own form dissolving into a spire of war-smoke in a graveyard ripe with the death of wish-fat stars.
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