On a night, one with a scythe moon instead of a full one, she had listened to the death-dreams of an owl who lost his wings. His dreams (although they seem to her more like prayers now) had been heavy with the taste of starlight and moonlight whittled down to fit inside the belly of a firefly. They had too, as she wandered through his thoughts, the memory of fox teeth. He recalled the feel of them, the agony of the tongue between them as it lapped at his blood like a hound a bowl, when he fell like a stone from the tree that collapsed beneath him.
She recalls the feel of death as it ran through his bones and the way his eyes felt like a pond of ice caught above his beak as he stared, for the very last time, at the moon. And she remembers too, now that she thinks about it, how his eyes had looked when daisies had pushed the ice out.
When the mare’s face dips into sorrow she can see the wanting of ice in her mortal eyes. What others might see as sorrow she knows as the feel of teeth, and a lapping tongue, and a waterfall of feathers instead of tears. And she knows, with a unicorn’s knowing, that the mare would be better off with whittled down starlight and moonlight in her belly instead of fruit, and roots, and slivers of iron from the lantern between her teeth.
A daisy, strange and red and beautiful, blooms from pathway at the mare’s hooves (where only an inch of ruined dirt lingers) like an offering-- an offering to push all the ice out.
“If you must ask me what I meant you have not yet met Isolt.” She smiles, but there is more warning than kindness in the look. The melancholy sound of her voice is a sonnet to the sad sea on which she still aches to bury a seed brighter than a pearl. When she blinks, slipping into that dark recall of her dream sea, it is to hide the look of pity for what the mare will discover when she meets the wrath of her beloved sister.
When. Not if. Isolt is always a when.
When will the sun eat the moon? When will the worms eat the buried corpse? When will the gods discover the same feel of teeth that the owl had? When? When? When?
The dawn, unlike how it normally feels, seems like a thing too small for her attention in the pure desolation of this mortal. The daisy offering billows in the wind of her soft and fragile movement as she closes the distance between them. “It must be agony,” she whispers as she lifts her check towards the mare’s cheek in the same greeting she always gives her sister, “to feel sorrow instead of hunger. How do you stand it?”
And for the first time she thinks, as only a thing immortal made in the shape of a holy and profane god can think, how painful it must be to be mortal.
@Meira
