If there is a way for any mare, any mortal, to have a stallion caught between her lips, and fire, and a dark looming forest, she imagines there must be more beauty than terror in it. Her eyes wander again to the caught stallion and mare snared upon him like another caught thing. All she can see is the terror of it in the way that no matter how many times they kiss, or whisper in touches of hip and rib, they cannot see the hearts begging for freedom in their chests.
Danaë cannot see them lasting longer than a night nor can she see any poetry in the way any mortal might have another.
How ruinous a thing, she thinks, is desire. And for a moment, when he turns his back to her and gestures for her to walk, she thinks desire is not the only ruinous thing laying coiled in a black snake of rot beneath a mortal’s skin.
Her horn aches as the shadow of it falls into the darkness of his (it has wanted to run him through, and through, and through until the poetry on his tongue was only pollen and seed). But she tells it to be tame, be gentle, be a whisper and not at howl as she walks close enough that their shoulders might tap together occasionally like two rocks in the Rapax.
A twin, even one more made than born, does not know how to untangle herself from the roots and flowers of others. And so she tangles into him with a smile that whispers instead of howls and a hunger that buries itself into the garden of seeds curled into her belly. “For a cursed land,” she smiles to bite back the image of him with seeds and pollen instead of romanticism, “it sounds very golden and full of life.” She bites back the urge to ask him just how many perished in the winter with the gods watching from their mantles of power.
Her shoulder bumps his, feeling spring warmth instead of winter’s chill and something in her shatters for the ache of frost, and sleeping oaks, and ghostly shadows of branches. “I have believed stranger things in this world than a castle full of doors.” Their shoulders bump again when he looks at her with a gaze bright with a sense of something she cannot understand. What is adventure to him is only the desperation of hunger, and needing, and the wistfulness of a seed in the wind, to her.
“Tell me a story,” her steps falter as the firelight halos around his head and promises nothing of warmth to her, “of a time past that kept the chill from you.” And as unicorns do, she does not ask when she lays her lips against his cheeks and waits to feel the story as much as she waits to hear it.
@Nightwish
