Below her lips the story feels like a sentient thing. She can feel the ridges of his pauses like scales and she can count the feelings it blooms in her chest like bits of swallowed bone. Her thoughts turn the story into a memory full of wisteria, and lilies, and ghost pipes. In another place it would be more than thoughts, more than just the feel of that ruby caught between her teeth like a star. But when he pulls away, and turns to her with the story still dancing in his eyes like a creature curled below his soul (instead of one of word and count), she is not seeing him but a garden spread around her in the dead of winter.
Danaë wonders if she would be a ruby cursed or the summer moon hanging over wildflowers. And she wonders who he would be in a world in which she is neither unicorn or forest-god. Always, in every breath, she wonders.
Her tail curls around his shadows in an embrace her form does not know how to give, or want, or shape. “I hope you have seen the world you wanted to see as a child.” She does not have the mortality to ask if he has, or if she might help him. All she can do, all she can ever do, is count the echoes of his heart where they pulse below his throat and just above his eye. Her own mother had no stories of wonder, or love, or anything but answers to all the ways in which the threads of the world might be plucked as easily as the head of a flower from the corpse of it.
And she can see those threads moving slow as moon-shards where her tail has curled around his shadow.
“Delumine is my story. I will begin and end here I think.” Because for all the hunger of her mother, and that sharper need of her sister, Danaë does not want to pull the threads of more than a single world. Already her belly, her magic, her want and need, are full to bloating with each mouse and vole in her forest.
She has wolves and stags, bramblebears and wendigos, foxes and owls singing in the marrow of her bones so loudly she has forgotten what her own song might sound like. There is no room for stories of mothers and moons, or rubies, in each sharp puzzle piece of her.
A unicorn is no story, no tale. A unicorn is religion.
But she wonders how it might be to be something else. She wonders enough to pull her tail from his shadow like a blade from a chest. She wonders enough to open the gap between them so that the night might pour in incandescent instead of death.. She wonders enough to smile and dip her head to hide the softest blush of firelight from her cheek. And she wonders enough to say, “perhaps you might come find me in a garden underneath the summer moonlight,” as if he might find something there that is neither death, nor unicorn. As if she too might discover how to shape herself into the sound of a story instead of silence.
But whatever she might discover, whatever he might discover in the secrets of her, will not be tonight. For already the wolves, and foxes, and bears, are calling out for their salvation from the dirt. And as she always does, as she always will, Danaë races into the dark gloaming forest to find them.
@Nightwish <3
