For a unicorn made from a king, it has always felt stranger than it should to walk between stone walls. Each echoing step feels like a gateway mouth instead of a step, through a garden instead of a staircase. Part of her wants to turn back, to return to the meadow where her sister is laying a circle of death instead of beauty. In her bones she can feel the call of it-- the whisper of the mice caught for so long in the walls, the songs of sparrows trapped in the eaves arching above her.
The call of it, of death, is the only note carrying her forward through the lit staircase and the bodies pressing close enough that she can feel their heartbeats through their skin. Like a shield she gathers it around her, a dark cloak, to keep all the brightness of the mortals out.
Sometimes she thinks she hates them for the chaos in their blood, the frail beauty in their gaze that is so bright against the lingering shadow of their coming fates. Sometimes she hates them only for their hope (and what she calls hate is hunger when she is too tired to deny the harshness of it).
By the time she makes it to the balcony her lungs are aching with the want of air fresh from the sea, tinged with the lingering tang of rotten weed and sulfur. Her heart flutters at the taste of it on her tongue (for the taste of anything but sweat and flowers). The fluttering is soon replaced by the drumbeat of something that is not quite hunger but close enough that she has no name for it when the twilight wind howls through her horn.
Below her the flowers draw the shapes of constellations she does not know. But in the patterns she can see a bramblebear woven with wisteria, a sparrow stitched together with ivy, and a fox with a tongue of dandelions. Those are the only stories she can hear, the only songs she knows how to sing, when the lights between the lines of flowers are lit.
When the flickering light stitches out pale lines between the shapes in the flowers, her heart leaps at the sight. And she knows, as she turns to the girl coming closer, that it is not hunger she feels.
It’s wanting with an ache deep enough to devour her whole.
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