It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
This is the simplest language for her to understand. Deep in the marrow of her made and ancient bones she knows each syllable whispered in the clack of bone and bone. She knows the sentences written when they lock together like stags instead of creatures born from earth and air. In his feathers this is poetry and in his blood a sonnet. And she listens to it with an ear cocked, away from the low tide hush, hush, hush of the castle walls, towards him.
He is singing but she knows, when he doesn’t dissolve into beetles to gather in straight army lines down her rib-cage creases, that he doesn’t really understand a single note. There is magic and then there is the end of magic where it flickers like a dying star into the nothingness. She does not wonder which she is made of.
Danaë blinks like a fawn in the twilight gloaming and she sinks easily into the magic that slumbers and sleeps in her bones. Somewhere a rat titters dead and rotten beneath the stone and the jaw of an old alley cat snarls back. Somewhere there are a million dead things begging to live again.
Somewhere her sister is adding to the number like the spring adds to a garden. But here a single pale-white rose blooms from the dead wood cracking through the stone floor like lightning. A finger of fungus points wickedly towards them from the frame where no art lingers. A vine trails towards the ceiling desperate to escape the bloody unicorn eyes that trace its path and all the black beetle eyes that follow it.
For a moment she is tempted to break the silence with something more than the whispering scratch, scratch, scratch of beetle feet over their skin. But instead she slips deeper in the language of unicorns and things with magic and violence in their marrow. Instead she lays the flat blade of her tail against his shoulder and presses hard enough that she can feel his skin dimple around her touch.
A horn did not turn a pegasus to beetle. An antler can turn art but not a unicorn into insects. And so she wonders, as she leans into him, what a weapon might turn his skin into.
He is singing but she knows, when he doesn’t dissolve into beetles to gather in straight army lines down her rib-cage creases, that he doesn’t really understand a single note. There is magic and then there is the end of magic where it flickers like a dying star into the nothingness. She does not wonder which she is made of.
Danaë blinks like a fawn in the twilight gloaming and she sinks easily into the magic that slumbers and sleeps in her bones. Somewhere a rat titters dead and rotten beneath the stone and the jaw of an old alley cat snarls back. Somewhere there are a million dead things begging to live again.
Somewhere her sister is adding to the number like the spring adds to a garden. But here a single pale-white rose blooms from the dead wood cracking through the stone floor like lightning. A finger of fungus points wickedly towards them from the frame where no art lingers. A vine trails towards the ceiling desperate to escape the bloody unicorn eyes that trace its path and all the black beetle eyes that follow it.
For a moment she is tempted to break the silence with something more than the whispering scratch, scratch, scratch of beetle feet over their skin. But instead she slips deeper in the language of unicorns and things with magic and violence in their marrow. Instead she lays the flat blade of her tail against his shoulder and presses hard enough that she can feel his skin dimple around her touch.
A horn did not turn a pegasus to beetle. An antler can turn art but not a unicorn into insects. And so she wonders, as she leans into him, what a weapon might turn his skin into.
