Beneath her hooves, beneath their shadows tangling, she can feel the ebb and flow of a dead-city beneath the soil sea of the meadow. Each tide echoes in her heart like a roar and a shift between sparrow to bramblebear. Moles scratch at the horizon beneath her hooves. Hawks sink their wings through the roots and the mud of last night’s rain as if she’s a cloud through which they might taste freedom again, and again, and forevermore.
And when he exhales back into her she falls deeper, and deeper, and deeper down into the soil-sea city of the dead.
Later she might wonder, when she twists her horn with her sister’s and tells her about Arawn, what it was about his taste, his sound, his dangerous promise, that made her see roses sprouting from his eyes when she blinked. Later she might wonder at the way her heart trembled at the image superimposed on the backs of her eyelids of thorn and berry bushes woven down his spine. Later, when a risen mouse curls up to sleep in her name, she might wonder what about him made her dream of growing life out of the thunderous darkness of him.
But for now, as she presses closer to the edge of whatever hurricane he is promising her, she does not wonder at the beauty of a rose that might bloom from his retina. Danaê only wonders about, only hungers for the feel of his touch as he tucks a torn off rose into her hair. She only wonders at the wolfish snarl of her heart at both the cruelty of the gesture and the gentleness of it.
Can you see the cruelty in you, she wants to ask him, can you see the hate it must take to tear out one of my roses so carelessly?
If there is charm in the gesture she has lost it somewhere between the lament of the rose and the youthful stutter of her heart. “I imagine you will always make an exception for me.” When taps her horn against a bone-shard tangled into his mane it is to grow a tangle of tiny furled roses that sprout from the worn cracks of the bone.
And when she smiles it is to say, even death makes an exception for me. What is a stallion to death, at the very marrow and core of them?
Her teeth ache like the bone shards waiting to be filled with rose stems. They ache to clack, and snarl, and sink like feathers into the soil-sea death might make of his flesh eventually. They ache to sink into the hurricane and thunder of him (and there she might plant hope, after hope, after hope like seeds to be watered in blood).
But they ache a little less when she lays them against his neck, and whispers there with a nip as delicate and cruel as his gift of one her roses, “You.”
@Arawn
