Tonight the world is more colorful beneath the flickering stars than it had been the night before. Tulips of bone-white and blood-red glitter in the sickle moon as they tap against her legs in the breeze. Each tap is a mockery of a flicker, of the darkness left behind when a star slips between one world and the gap-jaw of a monster’s throat leading the way to the next. And the mockery of light is the only reason she lingers knee deep in the field of tulips when the fog starts to roll in.
Around her the twilight has turned into bruise-black night and it’s citizens have long since started to think of silk, and pillows, and four walls a unicorn has no need for. The music has turned into low laments running in vesper frail whispers between the baskets tossed around as haphazardly as a hundred promises. To her, as she angles the tip of her horn towards the sickle moon, it all seems a very mortal sort of slumber.
Perhaps it is because the hour is one of mortal slumber, and dreams spitting on silk pillows, that Danaë finds herself lingering between the tulips too rotten to be plucked.
And perhaps it is why out of each dead and broken stem of a tulip another bottom-of-the-ocean-black petal unfurls. Each of those dark-as-night flowers unfurls towards her and in each center there is a rotten and porous pollen egg that seems more eye than honey. She thinks of her sister’s gardens, ripe with ruin and the bent backward spines of birches bowing for their god, and how this place is so far removed from it.
Even the fog rolling in, thick enough to dust her lashes in dew (as if she is a garden instead of a unicorn), does little to turn this meadow into an altar. But her lips still lick at the moisture like holy water and her tail still cleaves the head of the tulips from their spines when a pack of coyotes howls in the distance. She anoints and becomes anointed because she does not know, as all made things do not know, how be anything else but god.
Isolt, and mother, have taught her well.
When she turns and casts her eyes, as bright and bloody as a cleaved out moon, onto the stallion as he joins her, there is that made look (that god-look) still echoing like a roar in her gaze. Danaë blinks and the fog billows up into crowning spirals through her horn with she lifts her nose from the throat of a cleaved off tulip.
And she has never felt more like a thing biding her time than she does now as a smile turns her teeth into a moon shorn violently from the gloaming fog and darkness.
@Arawn
