Denocte’s stories are nothing like the one she’s found buried in the old librarian's heart. There are no Eira in the stories here, no deathless, no unicorns running between the birch like ghosts. But when the fire crackles with a bit of magic and shoots stars from the embers she finds herself watching the brightness instead of a gull picking at a crab in the distant tide.
With her father beside her it is easy to see the wonder in the world instead of the hunger of it.
The thunder left in the wake of the god’s rage, when he tossed his sword into the tide, found itself a new home in the belly of the sea. There all the whales, and sharks, and coral reefs started to eat away at the edges of the thunder. They ate, and ate, and ate until through their bodies, as they all died, the thunder spread until it was in every molecule of the sea. It was in the water-creatures and the sea-weeds. It was in the dolphin’s hearts as they crested over the waves like shooting stars.
It is not its own rage that the sea roars with and if you put a conch shell to you ear and listen closely, and stay very quiet as it whispers, you might hear the story of how the rage of a god poisoned the whole sea: for the sea, back in the beginning of time, had wanted to be gentle.
The crowd falls silent as the story-teller tosses his last bit of magic into the fire. In their awed breaths Danaë cannot hear sorrow but wonder, magic instead of a heartbreak, rejoice instead of lament. And she wonders if this is what it means to be immortal, to be as made as the god in the story. She wonders if it means that someday every ounce of her rage, and hunger, and sleepy want of death, will infect the entire world.
Beneath her cheek her father’s shoulder is warm, sun-warm even in the dead of night, and she leans hard enough against him that she can feel the bones of his shoulder meeting those of her jaw. “Do you think,” she whispers into his mane, “that someday a mortal will press their ears to a owl’s nest in a great pine and hear the story of me instead of the story of the tree?” And she thinks that there might be a terrible secret in some dark hole of her heart when the question does not make her feel sorrow, or lament.
All she can feel is a rejoice that the forest (someday) would love her enough to hold some part of her, even a part as small as her sound, in a chewed out hole full of life.
Because that is what she hears in the steady lub-dub of her father’s blood and magic when she presses her ear against his ribs.
@Ipomoea
