Sometimes, and that some is more than sum, she wonders which world is dream and which is real. Each time she blinks her eyes (again, again, again, each faster than the last) there is that flash of carved upon bone and the superimposed brightness of flesh. There are flowers in the holes of each, like parasites, and they blink at her as they unfurl.
They whisper too, in the space between the inhale and the exhale, of memories her marrow knows. Her mind stumbles long legged and young over those memories as she tries to find them in the reflection of a pegasus.
And in the choke-hold of a memory, one in which her horn is screaming in the wind instead of singing, she steps closer to the girl. Later she’ll tell herself it was the agony of those dead sparrows that had her horn tilting like a blade instead of a kiss towards the girl. Later she’ll tell herself that she imagined ways to save her instead of kill her. Later she’ll tell herself that the darkness of her gaze, like iron in the tide, was nothing more than hope.
Nothing more than hope…
Danaë, who is still more unicorn than innocent (they eat the innocent after all-- once they’ve laid their heads on their fragile, mortal chests), moves to rest her horn across the pegasus’s brow. And she blinks one last time-- bone, flesh, bone-- before exhaling the last breath of every starling that burned. She can feel them, feel their frantic wings trying to shake loose the embers and the soot, in the walls of her heart.
The smoke of her breath in the cool graveyard air spirals out in stuttering plumes of mist and smoke. It rises, and rises, and rises, like all those starlings never will. They never will-- until she saves them. And her smile stumbles into darkness at the thought.
“You only need to look for your starlings to find me.” The redness of her eyes, that iron in the tide look, flutters like an ember-heavy wing beneath her forelock. She pulls away and tries, oh she tries so hard, to bury the roar of her heart-denied horn upon her brow. It bellows, and roars, and promises retribution. It aches and her tail blade echoes against the floor like a wolf’s tail against a door-- open up, open up, open up.
Let me in.
She takes another step, opening up that doorway between them upon which she knocks but hesitates still to cross. Her father’s blood still rushes through her, light to the black and life to the rot. And it’s her father’s blood that rules when she scrapes her tail down the mirror to leave a single scar down the images there.
It’s her father’s blood that blooms poppies in the bones of stars as she gallops into the darkness in search of the starlings that have been forgotten by girls who do not know which life they prefer to live. Danaë, with a bellowing cry, thinks she’ll always choose the starlings.
Always.
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