a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
In
the middle of the night, when the moon was high enough that her window could not hold it, she had awoken with the taste of brine in her teeth. The roar of the sea had rung in her ears louder than it had when she pressed her ear to a shell on the library’s mantle. Her thoughts, as she blinks and blinks and blinks to shake them loose, are full of white dolphin curling sea-froth and gulls screaming along the horizon. When she thinks of it, as she untangles herself from her sister, she begins to feel like a thing as brutal and wanting as a hurricane tide. She does not linger and wait for the feeling to settle, she starts to run.
And runs, and runs, and runs.
All the way to the sea she runs. The dawn is a pale speck of light on the horizon, a smear of rose-gold and lilac purple, by the time she walks. Down in the belly of the cliff and shore the tide has rolled out far enough that there are miles of sand begging her closer. A gull screams loud enough that her lungs sutter at the wanting in the sound of it.
The gull dives towards the sea and so does Danaë. Rocks tumble down the cliffs as she races to the shoreline. Each of her steps is as reckless as only an immortal can be, as deer-agile as a unicorn, a full of sonnet as a rose unfurling for the first time. Here, as the sand tugs at her weight, she feels like a wild thing in a way that has nothing at all do with the forest.
She cannot see a single tower of an oak to blot out the rising of the sun. And she wonders, for the first time, why her city watches the run rise through the forest and over their gardens instead of by the sea.
Across the horizon the rose-gold turns to just-gold, the lilac to royal, and the gull is joined by his flock. The sun edges up, a fat and round crown, and Danaë only shits her gaze over it quickly as a hummingbird as the gulls start to pick from the dying, forgotten creatures left behind by the shore. She watches them feast and that wild feeling, that hurricane tide of brutality, rises.
And just like she had run it rises, and rises, and rises.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
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