And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
When she had first read about them, curled up in the ferns outside the library, the mountains had seemed like pillars of stone, ice, and nothing else. They had not looked like bones but like earth shaped by eons that she will someday know the taste of. When she had first read about them, the mountains had seemed no more imposing than ink, and poems, and frail leather binding.
But here, in the belly of valleys and ribcage of snow-coated pines, the mountains seem not like pages but like monsters. Each step she takes is through the insides of the earth where they have clawed their way outside like a parasite. And had it not been for the ever-hungry weight of Isolt at her hip, she might have lingered in an eye-cave and asked the mountains what they wanted grown out of their horror and decay.
Instead she does not linger or pause in the eye-cave between rib cages of pines. Instead she slices through the moonlight with her horn and says, by way of their language, with every step, let us feed you sister.
Let us feed you.
Over and again, for miles.
Let us feed you.
Behind them, in that empty place left behind by their shadows, flowers follow. Dahlias bloom in the charred remnants of festering trees. Poppies grow (as bright as her father’s) in the half-moons where their hooves had left wounds in the earth. Roses, white as the bone-color on them both, bloom in each tree, each root, each weed that her sister had rotten. Danaë imagines her garden as new-skin laid over the mountain corpse, a pair of wings by which the bones and the eyes might take flight like hawks and feast, and feast, and feast upon the mortals.
When she lingers at the base of the towering hemlock grove, she thinks that she does not have to imagine for very long afterall. And when she takes the first leaf between her teeth, and looks to Isolt, she does not think but know.
But here, in the belly of valleys and ribcage of snow-coated pines, the mountains seem not like pages but like monsters. Each step she takes is through the insides of the earth where they have clawed their way outside like a parasite. And had it not been for the ever-hungry weight of Isolt at her hip, she might have lingered in an eye-cave and asked the mountains what they wanted grown out of their horror and decay.
Instead she does not linger or pause in the eye-cave between rib cages of pines. Instead she slices through the moonlight with her horn and says, by way of their language, with every step, let us feed you sister.
Let us feed you.
Over and again, for miles.
Let us feed you.
Behind them, in that empty place left behind by their shadows, flowers follow. Dahlias bloom in the charred remnants of festering trees. Poppies grow (as bright as her father’s) in the half-moons where their hooves had left wounds in the earth. Roses, white as the bone-color on them both, bloom in each tree, each root, each weed that her sister had rotten. Danaë imagines her garden as new-skin laid over the mountain corpse, a pair of wings by which the bones and the eyes might take flight like hawks and feast, and feast, and feast upon the mortals.
When she lingers at the base of the towering hemlock grove, she thinks that she does not have to imagine for very long afterall. And when she takes the first leaf between her teeth, and looks to Isolt, she does not think but know.
