Last night her dreams were fat with the sea. Each wave had curled like a star racing across the darkness caught on the point of her horn. The reeds had sung as they whispered along the curl of her belly and tapped out notes against her hocks. Sand had caught between her teeth like pearls in the eyes of a corpse and shells had climbed into her mane like spiders instead of mollusks.
In the tide she had heard things: whispers of fish in the belly of sharks, gulls caught in the tangled nets of a sunken ship, corals clawed out by the hunger of sea-dragons and water-horses. Each has begged her into the waves, into the darkness, into that gap-jawed space hanging like a noose on her horn. She had listened until she was belly-deep in the dark waves with those shells climbing higher and higher into her mane.
And then she did more than listen. She had responded, mouth deep in the star-curl of a frothing wave, and her voice was not sound but bubbles of a thing caught in the said.
Mine, she said. And every dead thing caught in the dark-waters had rejoiced and rose up with their weed-tongues, and their water-frond lips, into a hallelujah.
Danaë is still thinking of the sea when she wakes before the dawn touches the horizon. The tide is still a dull roar in her ears and a salt-pain in her stomach. Each step sounds like a stone caught in a current as she wanders down the stairway and past her parents room. Behind her the dark spanse of shadows feels like a secret, a memory of the dream slipping away with each hallway she passes.
It feels like a reminder too, when it fades to nothing as she steps into the black darkness before the dawn. The flat of her blade tries to keep it but does nothing more than make a whining sound across the stones towards the garden archway. As she continues the grasses swallow up even that sound as she strays into the rows of roses, and lilacs, and red-as-blood poppies.
The garden swallows up the last echoing roar of the sea in her ears. All she can hear are the buried song-birds, the eaten-by-an-owl mice, and the hens caught by the fox, when she emerges from her father’s garden. But when she spots the unicorn with a lantern in her mouth she can hear the song of the fish in the belly of a shark again. Danaë does not bother wondering where that song came from when she steps into the lantern and says, “hello again,” with the same melancholy poetry of the tide against the shoreline.
@Meira
