Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
Aster would tell the princess, if she could pick apart the thoughts in her head like golden hairs caught in a bramble, that there are other things to feel then sorrow and hunger (though probably the girl would not listen - Aster herself would not, whether a stranger or a mother said it. Perhaps the sea itself will teach her).
She does not mind the way the unicorn looks at her, like she’s trying to see below her skin, where golden dapples still paint her back like sun-shadows. I had been dreaming of the sea, the girl says, and Aster nods, her golden tines catching and tossing back the gleaming new-day light. The waves sigh behind her, the sea, the sea, and Aster trails behind as the other girl goes to meet it.
She is a little jealous of the ocean, then, to snatch the unicorn’s attention; but she understands, too. All that open water, all that whip of foam and crest of wave, it is mother and teacher and goddess to her. There is nothing better than flying above it on the very edge of a storm, racing the leading edge of a wave as it grows and grows, near enough catch the spray when it at last dashes itself against rock. There is nothing like its hundred-hundred voices.
But it is not the sea she watches now, when she has the opportunity to study the unicorn and the bone-scythe of her tail (this is when Aster realizes she’s met this girl’s twin, and how like they are, photo negatives of one another), and each dark spot like undiscovered islands in an ocean of cream clouds, and a spiraling horn she is sure the wind might sing through.
How sharp, she wonders (as she had wondered about her own tines, before testing them) were those weapons? Did the girl know?
When the unicorn looks back, Aster does not look away, abashed; she mirrors the smile, and steps near enough to hear that she was right about the singing wind through her horn. In the dawn-light, the girl’s red eyes glow like sun through colored glass.
“I think the sea does not have to give back anything she doesn’t want to. What’s hers is hers to keep.” She shrugs, uninterested in interpretations; it certainly didn’t matter what she believed. It wasn’t her dream.
“Is that why you came?” she asks, and slips just a little closer, subtle as a wave. From here she can smell the forest on the girl, dark green pines and firs, just a little sweet; she imagines the unicorn passing beneath them in the moonlight. It makes Aster want to run with her, or after her, or before her.
@Danae | <3
