a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
The
sharp edges of the earth give him away before she notices the flash of gilded gold and sooty mud moving towards her. Each stone, each dead branch, each root tumbling down into the belly of the forest-god cracks open some longing ache inside her heart. It feels as if pieces of her have been flayed from her bones. She is aching as much as the struggling wildcat when he stops her blade. And then she is not aching, or longing, or seeing only those stones tumbling down. Danaë sees red, blood-red, red brighter than the shine of her sister’s coat in the garden sunlight.
In their shadow the trapped animal cries out again, caught deeper into the brambles she had been cutting away from it. But when she turns to look at him it is not the look of a young-god saving a creature in her god-belly forest. When she looks at him it is the look of an immortal made, a unicorn, a beast whose blood beats of rend, and ruin, and consume, in the very dark and frail bottom of her soul. Like a predator, one not caught in thorns, she catches his flinch and smiles with her mouthful of teeth.
Danaë is no ghost in the forest anymore, no unicorn with her horn pressed soft as a kiss to art.
Bright nightshade petals grow between the lilacs when she pulls her blade from his tines and angles both of her bone swords towards him. “I am no hound for you to command.” Her voice is no louder than a whisper almost drowned in the bleating cries of the wildcat. Had he known her better, or known her as more than art to be bled out, he might have known her whispers are far, far more dangerous than all the snarls she does not know how to make. “And that animal is no it that I will leave.” Another whisper, another warning.
At her hooves, where all the dead leaves have rotted vines fat with berry and leaves start to bloom and weave around her legs. Steady, steady, steady, they whisper to her. Steady, a coyote skull in the ravine whispers the same song, the same warning as the vines.
Danaë steps closer to him as quietly as her whisper. Her nightshade and lilac grow, and grow fat, to bolster the caught animal from the thorns. “I am going to free him from the brambles and if you try to stop me again I will free him by drowning the bush in your blood.” This time her whisper is not a warning but a promise as her tail blade hangs close to his carotid artery.
And even filled with all this red, and ruin, her heart aches as the animal cries out again in agony.
“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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