Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
Ants are being boiled in the fire, their exoskeletons cracked open and popping like bits of amber tossed into the flames. With them moths are burning and worms are digging deeper in the dirt desperate to feel any relent from the embers sinking into their homes. Skulls are charring in the heat from where they rest below the spring grass wavering in the night breeze. The entire meadow, the entire meadow, is fat with sorrow at the desecration religion has sliced open its throat with.
And for the first time Danae discovers what it is to look upon the beliefs of mortals and crave the unmaking of them all: tibia to tooth, femur to ventricle, rib to liver. Her mouth dampens as the thought and her belly rumbles like a bear in the dead of winter.
She is still listening to the popping ants, and the screaming moths, when the other unicorn approaches. On her skin, when Danaë licks her flavor and detangles it from the char of soot, she can taste brine and strangeness. Her soul, her made and terrible soul, bellows to her that this is not a unicorn, not in the way that anything is a unicorn.
Her teeth and tongue ache for the feel of femur, for the feel of anything to blot out the screams of the wood and the forest scavengers as they all die. A dead fox beneath her hooves clacks his broken teeth as roots weave his broken jaw bones back together. She swings her horn towards the approaching unicorn and a pillar of smoke, one clinging to the wanting hollows of her horns, follows.
She does not stop the arc of her horn until it is pointing at the hollow above the mortal’s left eye (the one begging to unfold, and unfurl, and root daisies in it). “The forest could have been something more than embers.” Her voice is little more and little less than a frothing snarl held together with those same woven together fox jaws.
The grass whispers under her hooves as she steps closer. A fox paw scrabbles at the dirt beneath her hooves but is too weak to be free of it. Beside the fire a stack of wood starts to bloom with a garden (wisteria, and lilacs, and mint). And the look in her eyes as they flicker to the new-born garden and back to the mare promises that it’s not rain that will water her foliage.
And for the first time Danae discovers what it is to look upon the beliefs of mortals and crave the unmaking of them all: tibia to tooth, femur to ventricle, rib to liver. Her mouth dampens as the thought and her belly rumbles like a bear in the dead of winter.
She is still listening to the popping ants, and the screaming moths, when the other unicorn approaches. On her skin, when Danaë licks her flavor and detangles it from the char of soot, she can taste brine and strangeness. Her soul, her made and terrible soul, bellows to her that this is not a unicorn, not in the way that anything is a unicorn.
Her teeth and tongue ache for the feel of femur, for the feel of anything to blot out the screams of the wood and the forest scavengers as they all die. A dead fox beneath her hooves clacks his broken teeth as roots weave his broken jaw bones back together. She swings her horn towards the approaching unicorn and a pillar of smoke, one clinging to the wanting hollows of her horns, follows.
She does not stop the arc of her horn until it is pointing at the hollow above the mortal’s left eye (the one begging to unfold, and unfurl, and root daisies in it). “The forest could have been something more than embers.” Her voice is little more and little less than a frothing snarl held together with those same woven together fox jaws.
The grass whispers under her hooves as she steps closer. A fox paw scrabbles at the dirt beneath her hooves but is too weak to be free of it. Beside the fire a stack of wood starts to bloom with a garden (wisteria, and lilacs, and mint). And the look in her eyes as they flicker to the new-born garden and back to the mare promises that it’s not rain that will water her foliage.
