Her heart, that sparrow in a monster’s mouth heart, trembles down into heartbreak from sorrow. It laments in cracks, and quivers, and seedlings rupturing through her aorta. Here it has forgotten the song of joy, of the wind billowing through her horn, of the saplings bowing meak and mortal as she hunts with her sister, of the euphoria of a mouse as it drags a daisy down its hollow reed throat. Here it has forgotten how to feel anything but tragicness, but regret, but an agony so deep and endless that Danaë, as she trembles, feels not like a girl, or a unicorn.
Danaë feels like all the stars in a constellation as a blackhole opens up between them and promises eradication.
She is not Isolt designed to survive the brimstone and monster world. She is not Isolt to drag her teeth down sorrow and swallow it like wine and nightshade leaves. She is not her mother to hunt, and rend, and ruin, and consume, until all the agony is a tine on the crown upon her brow. And she is not her father who can press their bloody cheeks together and grow a garden full of a million hopes, and smiling flowers, and vines that pull her away from sorrow instead of into it.
She doesn't know what she is outside a unicorn with death wrapped around her sparrow in a cage heart that begs for life, and sky, and freedom.
But when her father presses his cheek to hers, and grows a garden around her, she wants to be full of his beauty with a desperation that aches far deeper than hunger. If there is any choice that she can make it would be the understanding of flowers that smile instead of consume, and whisper instead of howl. And so she lets the flowers lead her away as a desperate things lets a noose wrap around their neck just to lift them out from the open-belly of a cliff face.
If this is how he must save her, how he must save anything sorrowful with a garden, she can find it in herself to understand.
A dahlia and a daffodil rise from the blood and the star-and-monster-flesh wood. A weed vine coils around her father’s vine, and a sapling sprouts downward from the bone-roof as if they are two suns instead of two things straining for life like hounds at a fox den.
“Then if it all must rust, or die, I will make it bright again.” And because she cannot, does not know how, to be anything but life chasing after death chasing after life, a sunflower rises from the meat of the wailing store like each drop of blood is fertilizer instead of sorrow.
@Ipomoea
