She has only ever known flight through the thoughts of a sparrow caught in the loam. Through that sparrow she had tasted the winter-frost of the north wind and the desert-dryness of the south. She has felt the humidity of a forgotten island jungle weighing down her eyelashes. The weight of wings, even ones long turned to dust draped across flight-bones like satin, had made her shoulders ache with the need to run, and run, and run, until a cliff was at her belly and a sun gorged on the point of her horn.
And when the girl joins her, and the light shifts to a halo on feather instead of crown, she desperately wants to know what flavors might linger yet on her skin, her lips, and the places where feathers whisper instead of roar.
Isolt would bleed it from her.
But Danaë, only feels that sparrow in her chest stumble into wakefulness and catch a mouse in his beak as if he is owl instead of song. She only feels the way her shoulders ache less when she turns into the girl’s shadow like a wraith instead of away from it like a unicorn should. The flowers do not hold their appeal in the memory of winter-frost and desert-dryness. How could, she thinks, anything?
“I do not feel like one.” She whispers quietly enough that she can imagine her face buried in feathers instead of the golden sunlight billowing through the castle. “Or at least I do not know what it should feel like to be one.” Danaë steps closer so that she might sink deeper in the girl’s shadow, deep enough that she hopes to discover how she was supposed to feel before her bones quicked by hours instead of months.
It feels like something vital, some secret, had been stolen from her before she knew to miss it.
Below them a meadowlark starts to sing and the forest of songbirds in her chest leap like rabbits to the sound of home. She wonders if the girl can hear it, hear the way her heart does not sound like a pulse but like a forest in the middle of a summer day. A mouse caught in the wall flickers open his violet eyelids and for a moment all she can see is the black belly of the castle where all the things forgotten by the sunlight live.
She opens her eyes again and the brightness, where it dances in the girl’s eyes, is blinding. And when she brushes her hip to a wing and asks, “do you?”, it is the sound of that violet-eyed mouse praying for a little bit of a sunlight.
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