The darkness of the forest, beneath the church-steeple pines, has never seemed like true darkness to her. In each shadow, and each shadow pressed upon a shadow, she can see a hundred colors laid down upon each other. She can see the faded rust of pine-needles, the violet darkened where a field mouse hurries past, the blue of a bruise where the light almost dapples the edges of a shadow tree. Between all the colors her white seems more like a scar in the forest that a color made from the very ichor of Viride.
Isolt had always been better suited to the forest-- more predator than lost ghost caught between roots and towering trunks.
Today her thoughts and all the sorrows of the buried Eira are hers and hers alone. She can feel each aching loss like a crack in her frail glass heart. Her stomach gnaws at itself like a sick fox when she feels all their hunger for leaf, and flower, verdant meadow grass. Each time she blinks the backs of her eyes flashes white, white, white with the memories of a child killed for land, greed, and power.
Danaë feels wrath then.
Her blood races faster than the Rapax with the fury of a hundred victims of a senseless war. The pace of her steps turns slower, more hunting wolf than doe galloping through the darkness in search of green. And in what light, what little light there is in the kaleidoscope darkness, makes the red of her eyes seem like fire instead of dried blood.
In her shadow a field mouse, one that had died in a late frost, rises from the dirt to dance around her hooves on paws of lichen. His eyes, bright and young poppy flowers, lift up to look at the curl of her stomach like she’s the moon fallen into the thick forest. The risen mouse’s war cry is almost nothing more than a shrill and painful bleat that Danaë can hardly hear in the echo of the child’s wrath.
She does not notice him, not until they turn together and her vision fractures into her-sight and the risen-sight as they both consider the crack, crack, crack of some not-ghost walking through their forest.
@any!
