widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
C
arrying all the things, all the ghosts, that live in a unicorn is still a skill she’s trying to learn. In each dahlia that blooms there is an echo of it in the dark spaces between the petals. All the roots, as they rise like weeds from the dead stars, have bits of rotten wishes held between them. Danaë, when she titles her head to wonder at the roots, sees herself reflected back in the pieces of caught glass-bones.Each piece seems to her a ghost of everything she’s trying so hard to carry. She can see her horn that looks exactly like Isolt’s. The curl of her neck, where it hangs just below an unfurling bloom, looks like the other unicorn’s (beauty with a suggestion of violence where it forgets to be soft and gentled by mane). Even her eyes look like one of her father’s eyes looking back at her when she turns to watch the expression in her gaze as she watches her garden grow, and grow, and grow, until the graveyard and the mirror are living things. And she wonders which shard of glimmering bone caught in the roots shows a single part of her that is just her and her alone.
If there is one there she does not see it or bother to look for it when Isolt and the wolf turn the air electric with a need she knows better than she knows the song of her heart.
Her tail angles towards the wolf, a warning her body makes without her permission. The instinct to kill is there. It is buried deep down below her hunger for life and beauty, but it is there nevertheless. Beneath the electricity in the air, that feeling of doom and ruination, it takes longer than it should to realize the silence has been broken.
She’s about to answer in the exact moment Isolt does and she turns away from the ghosts of other souls (where there should have been only pieces of her) to watch the wrath and hunger consume her sister. The air is more than electric now, it is weighted like there are stones in the air instead of fog. She moves to press her cheek to her sisters as she says, “and Danaë,” as if Isolt had not stumbled down into some instinct deeper than the center of the graveyard.
Beneath her touch, when she presses her lips to the corner of Isolt’s, she can feel her trying to swallow the hunger back down. It feels as natural as breathing to push their hips back together when she turns once more to consider the unicorn and her wolf. “Who are you?” She asks. Because it had not escaped her notice, even in the stone-filled air, that the unicorn asked but did not offer.
Isolt, if she cannot settle down her hunger, should at least have a name by which to hunt, and Danaë should know who it is she’ll grow flowers for.
{ @Isolt @Aspara"speaks" notes: <3
