Danaë wonders if he understands the secret language he has used to ask her to follow him outside the crowd. She wonders if he knows the danger of that language in the realm of mortal men with songs of love dying out in the shadows that start to nibble at their own as they walk. The sound of their hoof-steps reminds her, as he directs her gaze to the lovers (or almost-lovers) lingering in a dark corner, how easily things turn to something else when pointed out.
The weight of her gaze aches when she tries, and tries, and tries to see a moment as soft as the one he describes. But all she can see is the touch of flesh that has nothing to do with any hunger she can understand. She does not look at him when he looks away, she is still trying to discover the meaning in a world she has seen for the first time. “And what is it that she has found?” Her voice is a whisper, an echo as all her words are echoes of something else, that carries through her the dead dreams of a city full of mice and worms. Danaë does not care for whatever the stallion has found (because how, she thinks, is courage a thing to be found and lost instead of borne).
It is only when she looks at him again that she can see the beauty in his dark and bone coat, in the way he can smile as if the world is something fragile and lovely instead of wanting. The weight of her gaze tries to discover something in him, some other hint, that he truly understands the secret language. But she cannot find it when she says, “You can call me Danaë.” She presses her nose to his neck, and inhales in another sentence of that language.
Beneath the smoke and cedar and jasmine he smells like the mountain full of nightshade and snow. And when she opens her mouth again it is a wonder those stars Isolt pulled from her belly do not pour out. “Delumine is my home.” She inhales again. “I can smell the mountains on your skin. Where are you from Nightwish?” Her tail curls around his shadow like an embrace she does not know how to give in any language.
@Nightwish
