Tomorrow the dawn will bring rain-fat clouds across the horizon. It will turn those water-clouds golden, and rose-kissed, and each flower in her corpse garden will glimmer with gilded dew instead of frost. Each time she closes her eyes, and her heart races sparrow in a storm fast, she can see every kaleidoscope of color.
Tomorrow, she already knows, will remind her of him.
But tonight the fog is only rolling in thicker, and thicker, until it’s a cage keeping the rest of the world from them. Tonight the gloom does not carry a warning of rain but a promise of it as sea-salted and root-food as a summer storm. She can taste it on his hair, salt enough to make her think of sorrow. The flavor of it echoes a dream she had one night and it feels as if she’s racing down the cliffs to the sea when his lips only promise touch at the shell of her ear.
This must be hunger, she thinks, true hunger.
To her it does not seem so very deep, or so very dangerous, when she leans into his touch like a wolf to a collar (all for the promise of a bowl of food and the hand of it after). She can already taste him on the very cusp of her echoing throat in which not a single hawk, or stag, or songbird is stirring yet. The dark chasm of her soul brightens with hope, and want, and that feel of true hunger rising like a tide. She wonders if the ocean will pour out when she opens her mouth again.
“You are arrogant, Arawn.” The words come even as she bows beneath the feel of his touch between her shoulder blade. Hair rises like seedlings down her spine as the electric pulses from his heat settle into her skin like a stormfront. “But do not,” the first sparrow since he found her echoes in her throat, “let arrogance make you blind.” And the sparrow settles to song and the hawk falls into a nosedive as he plummets through her heart when she lifts her tail blade to rest below his eye.
Danaë is disappointed that she had to remind a hunter how foolish it is to think of consuming before teeth are laid at a throat. But she tries to forgive him for not being raised in the bosom of the forest with a sister who has a hunger deeper than a blackhole.
Her tongue does not need the flavor of his blood to know the feel of it. But tomorrow, in the rain, will be soon enough to learn the flavor of him.
He should have known better, already, than to point her towards civilization like the realm of walls, and fireplaces, and church-bells are the salvation of a unicorn. There is nothing holy for her in the cities of mortals, or in the gazes of men who look so deeply but see nothing. So when she leaves him with his hounds alone for company she lets her blade cleave miles of wounds in the earth by which he might find her again, and again, and again.
And she wonders, as the dark wild consumes her, if he’ll be blind enough, or man enough, to consider him the hunter and her the prey as he follows her trail of bloody and flowered earth.
@Arawn
