widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
T
he first note of the eulogy of wolves goes just like this: a flash of fang, a drop of spit that falls like a fat tear onto the torn open heart of a fawn, a snarl that is trying to be a kiss between tear and vein, a sickle moon curling scythe hollow over the sonnet. That first note rises as the moon does, in an arc of silver between the graveyard veil of clouds dark and ominous as the look in her sister’s eyes. But the second note of the eulogy of wolves goes like this: a whisper of the rest of the pack moving over frail winter leaves bared by the melting snow, a clack of brittle nail against whetstone, an ominous hush broken only by a hundred gurling growls of stomachs empty and aching with the same hollowness as that sickle moon.
And the second note ends with--
Silence.
There is nothing after the second note.
Danaë can feel it rising, the first note and the second and the silence, as night does in the sunpale lining of her skin. It blossoms and unfurls as roses in tomes of hunger heavy upon her tongue. Each scream of a violin and each brass warcry of a drum only sets her teeth to dripping tears and her lips aching to be set into the sickle curve of a snarl.
A wyrm swims across the sand in her belly and a neurbian etches maps into the tender lining of her liver. A pack of wolves beds down in the forest thicket of her nerves and veins. A unicorn blinks her eyes at the song of horns as it cleaves open a silence that only the eulogy of wolves might fill. Danaë, pale as her sister is bloody, blinks before she lets the song weld each ore porous edge of her into steel.
No, he says.
All she hears is please.
So she becomes. Oh she becomes. In each tome of song and drop of spit pooling into an ocean behind her snarl she becomes. She becomes the devourer of men, of innocence, of the music that shatters into screams and panic. Like a rose becomes a thing embedded into flesh-- she becomes.
And what is left in the wreckage of the clash of horns is the thing that comes after the second note: silence.
Her hooves are as silent as the pack’s paws over the rotten leaves. Her shadow is just as dark as her sister’s cloud swallowing the moon. Her horn is a gurgling thing upon her head and it is braying, braying, braying for anything to fill it to wholeness. And her blade, her sickle blade, makes less than the sound of a nail against a whetstone as it rises to lay just below the tender curl of his mortal throat.
Every pack-- the wolves and lions and jackals-- in her belly starts to sing the second note of their own eulogy.
{ @Isolt @Vercingtorix "speaks" notes: <3
