Wrath has always been a fickle thing to her. Anger does not fester in her heart as her mother’s does until a wolf becomes a dragon. She does not spit, and froth, and turn her head from the mortals in fear of devouring them all. But while it does not fester, or turn to dragon in her heart, it lingers. Like a shadow at the bottom of the forest, like nothing more than a layer of dark on black, it lingers.
She tries not to hate the vibrancy of the quiet meadow with the bonfires sprinkled throughout the newborn blossoms and grasses. When she looks at the trees, haloed like gods in the firelight, she tries to see only something holy enough to live in her dreams. There is life here, she knows there is, but she cannot fully see it when it’s superimposed over all this death. And beneath her hooves a city of forgotten mice with forgotten worms in their rotten bellies start to rouse and whisper to her how wrong, wrong, wrong these creatures that inherited the world are.
Danaê thinks, not for the last time, that the forgotten mice have a hundred other worlds and an eon of things forgot to share with her.
Earlier she had not eaten pastry but grasses sweet with the sugar of spring. She slaked her thirst not with wine but soothed it belly deep in an offshoot of the rapax. The music had been a eulogy to spring instead of a sonnet to it when she pressed between the citizens of her city and danced. And if there had been a shadow in each of her steps, a memory of that lingering wrath and war, no one but a unicorn might have noticed it.
Her steps are still full of that lingering memory when the stallion bumps into her. In her bloody gaze there is, in the poppy color, a glimmer of ruby war instead of flower. Danaë smiles, softly enough that her aching teeth are nothing more than a suggestion of violence beneath the pearl softness of her. “It is different.” She whispers.
She tries not to smell the bitter tang of charred herbs lingering in the smoke caught in his mane. And when she sighs there is not contentment in it but a smear of dark on black.
@Nightwish
