Spring has come and the snow white winter hare is dying. His eyes are growing colder by the trembling death beat of his frantic heart. The sun is shining overhead but, from where he rests just above her shoulder, Danaë feels him like the shadow of frost on her father’s garden. He feels like the ice that frosted her eyelashes in diamond dust while she raised a graveyard with her sister.
And she knows, she knows as a unicorn knows in her marrow, that she should lay the point of her horn to the hare’s belly. She knows she should crack him open like a shed-star's egg so that she might plant daisy seeds in the chambers of his heart and ivy notches where his veins split towards his heart and towards his liver. He could be her own (or his own as she would whisper to him) instead of a thing suffering in bleating sobs of agony.
Until now she had not understood the terribleness of the sound of dying. Until now she had thought it the sweetest sort of melody.
The hare’s eyes flicker open and he digs his teeth into the meat of her withers in a feral need to be free of the unicorn holding him too tightly with magic instead of understanding. Blood gathers in the knots of her mane where twigs, and leaves, and rotten flowers have been woven in by her twin. At the thought of her twin Danaë feels a secret sort of trembling.
Isolt would rather a dead hare than a suffering one.
Danaë thinks that maybe she might be the crueler one of them to make the hare suffer the saving.
When she notices the building in the forest it is almost by accident. It rises from between the tree trunks and the shadows like a secret gate to somewhere she suddenly longs to go. Her heart, in which she carries every cry of the hare, stutters in her chest like a sparrow in a cage as it dies. Like all made things she does not think to be cautious as she races through the doorway.
And she does not think to be anything but a unicorn when she tilts her horn towards the stallion standing there and demands, “help me”, instead of asking.
@
