It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
Her knees are still wet and stained with the blood of the weeping walls. Her horn is still dripping sorrow into splatters of art across the ruby, and emerald, and gold-leaf floor. The ache of her heart is still a tremble in her chest instead of a throb, drum instead of whining violin. Art, no matter how desperately she tries to find an answer in the twirling thorns of it, does little to settle the thing in her the cavern city has opened up.
The emptiness of her belly feels as yawning and full of teeth as the castle had when she dragged her horn through the eyes (bleeding retina into stone and pupil into wood) and demanded that it bow before a unicorn. Her blood feels just as wavering as the walls, and just as torn between being one thing and being another. And she’s not sure, as she feels the pegasus (it is always a pegasus) approach her, which thing her blood will have her become tonight.
He moves beside her, another shadow gilded in glitz in a castle full of them, and she only feels the way he moves the air around him more than he uses it to expand his lungs. Like an immortal thing learning the reflection of herself she savors the glitter of his horn the way a fox savors the shine of a mouse’s eye in the moonlight. She smiles when he scatters the art to the floor in a rainfall of beetles.
Her smile grows fat with teeth as they crawl and linger upon her bloody and damp knees like scarabs made of precious stone on a corpse.
This time, when one of them moves closer (she has forgotten which space is hers and which is his), she does more than feel the space between them gap like a jaw. This time, as the jaw closes and the teeth clack, she taps her horn to his antlers. Like he is art and she a pegasus come to draw profane scars across the gold wealth of him.
And when she drags her horn down to the first joint of tines her eyes shift towards the floor waiting to watch more beetles join the ones adorning her pale and bloody knees.
The emptiness of her belly feels as yawning and full of teeth as the castle had when she dragged her horn through the eyes (bleeding retina into stone and pupil into wood) and demanded that it bow before a unicorn. Her blood feels just as wavering as the walls, and just as torn between being one thing and being another. And she’s not sure, as she feels the pegasus (it is always a pegasus) approach her, which thing her blood will have her become tonight.
He moves beside her, another shadow gilded in glitz in a castle full of them, and she only feels the way he moves the air around him more than he uses it to expand his lungs. Like an immortal thing learning the reflection of herself she savors the glitter of his horn the way a fox savors the shine of a mouse’s eye in the moonlight. She smiles when he scatters the art to the floor in a rainfall of beetles.
Her smile grows fat with teeth as they crawl and linger upon her bloody and damp knees like scarabs made of precious stone on a corpse.
This time, when one of them moves closer (she has forgotten which space is hers and which is his), she does more than feel the space between them gap like a jaw. This time, as the jaw closes and the teeth clack, she taps her horn to his antlers. Like he is art and she a pegasus come to draw profane scars across the gold wealth of him.
And when she drags her horn down to the first joint of tines her eyes shift towards the floor waiting to watch more beetles join the ones adorning her pale and bloody knees.
