There has always been a way about things that know the feel of death slipping between their ribs like a blade that gives them away. Sometimes she thinks it’s a glimmer in the gaze, a nipping of spectral hounds that no dream, no sunlight, no wish, can hide. Other times she thinks the knowing is in the curl of the spine where it runs into the hip, a strangeness of the gait, a hitch that neither violence nor grace can tame. In her mother it looks like the curl of her horn in the moonlight and the blackness that clings to her skin like ichor a golden god. In Isolt it is the ever-present hunger in her smile that says over and over again, nothing is enough, nothing will ever be enough.
And sometimes she is jealous, terribly so, when she looks at all the things in this fragile mortal world and sees the death on them that she can never find in the ruby-shine of her gaze, the curl of her horn, or the shadows pooling at her hooves like memories instead of corpses.
Danaë can see it in the look of him, in him, around him where the darkness coagulates between hound and master. She can see it in his horn and his hair where the forest has been caught in it like a hare in a hunting trap. At the sight, at the glory of the thing she cannot find on herself, her teeth ache and her mouth waters for the flavor of it.
If she had drank immorality from her mother's womb and a stag’s heart, what would she be able to drink from him?
What would she be able to take?
The curl of her mouth bows into a smile at the same time her horn rises into a warning. “I would like to think”, she pauses to sigh as much as she pauses to inhale again the perfume of rotten tulips and fermented seed, “that it all suits me as much as the fog and the sickle moon suit you.” Her smile bends and bows to a deeper look, a feral look, a look that she has stolen from the reflection of her sister-- the look of hunger, and wanting, and danger enough to collapse the world with fear. On her face it feels strange but she wears it anyway as she steps closer to his bristling hounds, and his echoing look of hunger and wanting, and the same shadows that cling to her mother like ichor.
When her horn taps against his it is music, and a knell, and a sonnet she had hunted for in the forest one night. She does not hear the same war her mother hears, or the hunger of her sister, or the blooming garden notes of her father. She only hears an echo of horn against horn, weapon against weapon, that promises living far more than it promises death.
“You may call me,” like a young line in their new forged sonnet deep in the gloaming tulip garden, “Danaë". She does not look away from him when his bristlingiling hounds come to heel like children instead of hounds. Her bowing smile folds deeper into the mockery of obedience. And at her hooves, against her bone-white knees, a rose blooms out of the corpse of a cleaved off yellow tulip.
@Arawn
