And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
A sea of darkness and stars brushes against her belly and laps in waves around her muzzle as she dips it down into the water. Each star, as she swallows them back down, sits in her belly like a wish. Her pine-tongue and lichen throat shimmers with the brightness of a moon and when her sister pulls her loose from the sea the glow follows her.
In the moonlight, with the moonlight on her tongue, she feels like a bit of stone turned to molten embers and silver begging to be forged into a blade. All her arrow-bones, and her birch-legs, stumble as she tries to keep up with the comet Isolt has become. The sea of darkness and stars follows behind like a tide caught in the moon gravity of them.
Somewhere, where she is a unicorn still enthralled with the stark violence of the mountains, knows that someday the entire world will catch and snare in the gravity of them.
But tonight they are moonlight and when she runs and swims, her mane caught between Isolt’s teeth and their rib cages snarled together like roots, she does not spare a thought for the violence of the mountains. All her thoughts are too full with stars, and fairies, and ewes curled up like snakes. Her tongue is too fat with the taste of pinesap and bitter lichen to taste the sea water, or the wishes in her belly, or the ichor of the fairies. Each galloping step takes her deep into the flavor and into the stars.
And Danaë, as she feels the leaves where they’ve tangled with the sea, does not ask Isolt where they are swimming to. She follows in the same way she will always follow Isolt: with the desperation of soft thing trying to learn how to be sharp, and dangerous, and deserving of all the death tangled up with her life.
Even when the nightshade runs out in her blood, and the stars and darkness leak out as sweat from her pores, she follows.
In the moonlight, with the moonlight on her tongue, she feels like a bit of stone turned to molten embers and silver begging to be forged into a blade. All her arrow-bones, and her birch-legs, stumble as she tries to keep up with the comet Isolt has become. The sea of darkness and stars follows behind like a tide caught in the moon gravity of them.
Somewhere, where she is a unicorn still enthralled with the stark violence of the mountains, knows that someday the entire world will catch and snare in the gravity of them.
But tonight they are moonlight and when she runs and swims, her mane caught between Isolt’s teeth and their rib cages snarled together like roots, she does not spare a thought for the violence of the mountains. All her thoughts are too full with stars, and fairies, and ewes curled up like snakes. Her tongue is too fat with the taste of pinesap and bitter lichen to taste the sea water, or the wishes in her belly, or the ichor of the fairies. Each galloping step takes her deep into the flavor and into the stars.
And Danaë, as she feels the leaves where they’ve tangled with the sea, does not ask Isolt where they are swimming to. She follows in the same way she will always follow Isolt: with the desperation of soft thing trying to learn how to be sharp, and dangerous, and deserving of all the death tangled up with her life.
Even when the nightshade runs out in her blood, and the stars and darkness leak out as sweat from her pores, she follows.
