Every night she had not been haunting in the wake of her sister’s hunt had brought her a dream.
Last night she had dreamed of the sea beneath the fat moon. The night before she had dreamed of wandering a root system, her hooves had carried her in pulse from tree, to moss, to worm twisting in between the two. Tonight, in the hour right before the settling of dawn, she had dreamed of monsters.
Danaë had dreamt that she was the monster and that another monster had run shoulder to shoulder with her. Their tines had towered above the boughs of ancient trees and gathered up moonlight like a net cast into a silver sea. Miles had trembled like ants beneath the reach of their paws and foxes as tucked their heads down at claw and tooth as if it had been crown instead of death. Their eyes, because she knew instinctively that the other monster saw through the same black eyes upon her head, had seen in between the cracks of realities that lay hidden from mortals where the trees grew so closely together that there was no telling pine from oak or birch from pine.
And when she woke and looked to the moon bare of a sickle of brightness, she has looked away and saw a crack of that same reality waiting between one spiral of her sister’s horn and the next. But when she blinked it was gone. She woke her sister with a kiss upon her horn, a press of her lips to the bone in just the right place so that vanished reality, for a moment, sat between her lips instead of horn.
“Isolt.” Her heart’s name is a prayer upon her lips, an echo of the moonlight caught on that dreamt silver sea. In the pause of it, in the tremble of it as the flowers on their mantle wilt as her sister awakens, Danaë shivers with every flower as the dream starts to wilt too.
But she holds on to it with her soul’s teeth, and she pulls hard enough that the memory of a reality caught in a horn moves too, and it does not wilt again when Isolt meets her gaze. “The forest is calling again.” She does not explain, knows she will not need to explain when Isolt feels the way her heart rattles like a cage in her chest. She knows Isolt will see every inch of her straining for the dark, moonlit woods the way she strains to grow a flower (just a single flower) in her father’s garden.
Tonight, she has promised that monster in her heart she will not fear it. And the monster howls in response and echoes that same mark of the beast through her throat when she lifts the sound of it to Isolt’s ear so that she might hear it too.
