The unicorn follows the pegasus’s gaze in the silence that echoes in the absence of her answer. Her eyes glaze over the moon and the pale stars flickering so quickly towards a death she already knows the taste and sound of. Their stories echo through her heart as nothing more than echoes of wishes and whispers-- just as all dead and dying things echo.
And when her heart stumbles in her chest, and shifts to the melancholy sound of his, she knows that her body can make an echo of a dying thing. An echo-- just an echo, echo, echo, and nothing else.
An echo. She steps beneath his wings like a lamb beneath a teat, all pale white and tender to the touch.
Another echo. Her gaze sees not a star in the moon, or a mother, but an eye. It blinks at her through the eyelid clouds.
Echo. Echo. Echo.
He dusts her skin, beneath the false cosmos of boys pretending to be god, and she glitters like bones coated in bloody diamonds. She wonders if she looks like sin, or savior, or a black and ore gate waiting to be unlocked. She wonders if this is what it feels like to be beautiful-- like the way snakes feel curled up on a sunny rock with a dissolving rat screaming in their bellies. She wonders if he thinks she is beautiful when she looks up into his canopy of wings and stars and eats a dead-wish from his sky.
A rose falls down a marble cheek like a tear and somehow that sound, that wilting whisper of earth and stone, is louder than the swallowing of his star down her throat. And that sound, that whisper, recalls her into some dark purpose that her marrow had hidden in the mortal echo of his heart as for a moment (just a moment) she had pretended to be something that a unicorn simply cannot be.
“If I came with you Aeneas,” each word she feels in her bones the same way the marble had felt the falling of the rose, “your heart would run with me instead of with you.” She steps deeper into his stardust as a thing recalled to its purpose. Another blood red bloom paints streaks of pollen down a glittering, stony cheek.
“Do you understand?” The unicorn, now just a unicorn, asks as she lays her tailblade kiss soft against his throat. And this time the falling tear is not a flower but a drop of water and salt rolling down the bone-pale lines of her own death-cold cheek.
@
