a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
The
way the light catches across the dapples of his coat makes her wonder if she can forget something she has not yet learned. Her thoughts wander towards some resolution, some epiphany, that she has not yet realized she must reach. The blood in her veins shifts, and smolders, and billows like a cloud, until Danaë feels like she has become a horizon instead of a unicorn. As if she has become the end of their world instead of the end of death. And she wonders, oh she wonders so furiously, what might be discovered if she plummets over the edge of herself like a wingless bird.
What might she be able to divine from the glimmer in his eyes that has nothing to do with the refraction of the sun (his father's sun) upon the edge of her horn. Does he see a horizon there?
Can he see what might be, what is becoming, on the other side of her?
She does not tell him how she doubts that he knows the difference between mercy and killing. She does not tell him to follow her back to her sister's side so that she might have Isolt open her mouth wide. She does not not tell him how he only has to look down her twin's throat, and lay his brow across her teeth, to discover just how much of the world he does not know. She only sighs, a lamenting whisper of bell-chime across moss-and-ivy stone.
He would not understand, she thinks, if she carved the answers in what little of him Isolt would leave behind.
Vines, and flowers, and roses flutter against her doe-frail legs as if to tell her settle unicorn, settle when she starts to wonder if she could be Isolt so he would not have to wait.
“You will not.” She agrees with that lamenting sound of chime on moss and ivy. A rose at her hip, white as the one touching him is black, taps at her hock again. This time it does not tell her to settle and it does not call her unicorn.
The rose only tap, tap, taps as she steps closer to him. And that rose's children follow her as she moves. “But would you like to Aenas?”
“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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