“If I am the moon in every form,” she laughs with the sound of a songbird’s wings mocking the winter wind as they linger in the fall (and she cannot recall ever discovering the taste of a laugh on her tongue before now). “Is it to the hollow, scythe curl of me that you bow? Or do you bow to the full of me when I am bright enough to blind?” The rose taps a warning against her knee, where it guards her bones like one of his hounds when he taps his horns against the petals and the roots. Danaë however is a god of that frail rose and she does not listen as a god never listens to a prayer until it is anointed with blood.
The sound of his voice, the guttural cruelty in it, does not quell her curiosity but rouses it. And when he smiles she does not see a violence, or a danger, to be fearful of. All she can see, when the fog thickens into a universe around them, is a thing to cause fear in. Somewhere she is lifting her head to bay at the moon in the twilight with him, somewhere she is hunting him instead of watching him bow like a knight over a tomb instead of a princess.
But here, with her guardian rose, she is a moon with darkness curling around her in the false hope that darkness will prevail. It will not. It will not. It will not.
Behind her she can almost feel the quickening and the death of the lanterns. The darkness that follows does not feel like a weight but like a comfort, a thing by which she might claim her right as she had claimed the heads from the tulips so that something beautiful might grow from the ordinary. And like those roses, and orchids, and ferns clawing out of the corpses of tulips she is not a flower waiting to be seen but one demanding of it.
When he pulls away she follows him, and his hounds, not like a unicorn tamed but like one starved for the ichor offered by the grasses at his hooves. If his footfalls are thunder, a rolling roar that could deafen the tide, her own are the silence that follows it. She is the feeling in the bones that something is coming, something terrible, on wake of that ache in the air.
Danaë is not the storm Isolt is: the hurricane and the devouring lightning. She is the wake, the aftermath, the devastation underneath which the frailest of hopes blooms.
And her hope, her frailest of hopes, is blooming with the orchids, and roses, and ferns. It blooms when she presses her nose to his like a wolf pressing theirs to the chewed out belly of a spring hare. She exhales her air right into his lungs and she does not ask to be let in. “You told me I was the moon,” she whispers in those same laughing poems of songbird wings, “and so it will not be the dead candles that I chase.”
The next step she takes, the next aftermath of a storm, comes quicker on the heels of his thunder than the last had. Hope grows a root.
@Arawn
