Are in the dark together,—near,
Over and over again she tries to tell herself that the statues are not alive, or dead, or suffering. She tries to believe their stories are not laments, not prayers, not whispers of all the dreams dead in the belly of the stars that perhaps flow ever on like comets through their blood. Their shadows follow her, and their stories echo in her ears as if she’s pressed her ear into the waves of the shallow waters that brought her here.
Over and over she tries to tell herself to forget them, forget the way her flowers bloom in the cracks of their granite and river-stone teeth, forget that they move a little bit like risen when she turns her gaze to hill instead of rock.
You know you cannot forget.” Hati reminds her as he follows just as faithfully as the shadows, and stones, and her hound trailing his hip. Today he is another bit of woven together wishes-- one rabbit ear, one buffalo ear hidden in a thick patch of mossy hair. His stride is uneven on a stag’s leg, a hound’s paw, a rabbit’s soft hock, and a unicorn’s cloven hoof. Where the statues only whisper he echoes in the hills with a grotesque sound that she still calls poetry.
Danaë does not need to tell him that she knows. Her answer is in a look, a glimmer of blood in her eyes when she watches his antlers scrape against the gaping jaw of a looming statue that has yet to follow in her wake. But she is still trying to look only at her monster’s antlers and not at the way her flowers are becoming more and more of a suggestion of color in the dark stone mouth.
It is easier, in the end, to pretend that they are stone-- stone and nothing else.
By the time she finds the stallion her shadow has long belonged to the island, a hound, and a wendigo. It is not a unicorn’s shadow that stretches out ahead of her in the light. She tries not to read meaning in the shape of it, in the way it reaches with an antler to tap a greeting against the dark curl of his shadow brow. She hopes he might only see the curl of her neck, that way she slings it low as a fox at a wolf’s den to show (in the way of the wilds) that she has not come with her monster to devour up the island as Thana had.
She does not smile when she lifts her eyes up from the darkness of her borrowed shadow. Only the slow blink of her eyes, like a thing waking up, shows a flicker of something more than monster and unicorn. A whisper of movement, a wraith quiver of shadow, brings her closer to him and further and further into the promise of her shadow (just hers) touching his.
“You heard them too.” Like all unicorns she does not ask. It had been in the flicker of his ears that a sleeping bramblebear in her heart had noticed as she approached. There lingers in the glimmer of his gold, running like veins of a leaf through his skin, a promise of wild forest waits.
And she has always known (always!) of the things that she does not need to ask a wild forest.
@Erasmus
