a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
A
part of her, that unicorn part, snarls when he turns steady and sorrowful instead of challenging. That part of her does not think it would have minded the sound of another command falling from his lips so that she might have reason to cut them away from his teeth. But it can only snarl, and drag the single claw it has, against her bones as his magic quickens her blood into a fever rushing so fast that her wrath cannot keep up.Her fury fades with each whisper of hair against her knees. It fades with every bit of rot that creeps across the bramble bush and reminds her, once more, of how perfect a thing her sister’s magic can make of the world (and Isolt wields is so much better than this nameless, gilded boy). And she does not smile in the wake of it to tell him that there is not a thing in this world she and her sister would not share.
Danaë does not think Isolt would be disappointed in his antlers as a gift. They could turn him into a risen to die, and die, and die again for the price of their wrath. A universe of his death’s could belong to her sister then.
Perhaps if his magic had not carried her wrath away she might have discovered how many times a risen could die. But it is gone, gone with the thorns and the thicket, and all she has left are the healing flowers that have risen to heights far greater than a summer would have given them. She follows him as he turns, closely enough that she hears his whisper. And it does not make her feel pity, or wrath, or any understanding that a girl should have for a sad, lonely boy. His words only make her realize the difference between flying horses (for he is a horse now in every way that matters to her) and unicorns.
No unicorn would be so melancholy over a lost bit of soul. A unicorn would have just devoured each world, every world, until all them were forced to spit up everything they ever stole. A unicorn would not search but conquer. His lament makes her smile at the thought of it, of the way her sister would destroy each thing in the dark of space to find her if she was lost.
And Danaë would not have watched a wildcat suffer just to make some broken piece of herself feel whole. But it seems cruel to tell him all of this, a horse is too gentle for some truths. So instead she only steps from him to cut the healing plants her magic had grown in the deadwood. She lets him keep his silent whisper of sorrow to himself as she turns the herbs to a tincture the old librarian keeper had taught her when a child came to him with tears in her eyes.
Danaë does not want to hold an inch of his sorrow, even when she moves back to where he peers with too-heavy eyes at the injured wildcat. And had she known, or tried to understand, that the animal was his bonded she would have filled up with wrath again as the cruelty of lonely horses.
“Are you going to try to stop me again?” Her whisper is no less quiet than his but somehow the purpose in it, the unicorn surety, makes the sound of her seem heavier than the universe her sister would destroy. The look in her eyes though, as she steps closer to the injured cheetah, is full of a promise that if roused again his magic would not be able to take away another ounce of her wrath.
“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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