“We have been sleeping long enough.” The forest whispers through her throat. Birches echo in the hollows of her lungs. A monster snarls with a furious impatience through her jawline. The space between her eyes, when she blinks back the last dregs of a dreaming restlessness, sparks white as bone tossed into a dark forest. She sees every predator in the forest trapped in the space between their skin when she peers at their reflection in a mirror across the room.
There is no moment, at least not that she will ever recall, between the walls rising like bones around her and the forest taking its palace. All she will ever remember is the feeling of the dirt churning up like the sea beneath their hooves, the night billowing like a cloud around the feral lighting bolts of them, the trees moaning a welcome when the wind forces their backs to bend. There is only the forest, only the feel of her sister as their bodies dissolve into the darkness between root and bough, as they run.
And run. And run.
Monsters are still snarling in her throat and dragging their claws along her organs. Each is begging entrance as they clamour for her magic. And each begging roar sinks deeper, and deeper, as the darkness and vines coagulate around them as the forest gathers like a god around them.
She does not see a mouth as they plunge into the soul of the forest. Danaë sees only a horizon, a stretch of darker black that promises the rise (and ruin) of something long, long forgotten. The howl in her belly, and the snarl, turns to song and image.
A paw lands on the back of a rabbit and cracks it in two. An antler scrapes at the belly of a world until in the middle of a civilization a blackhole opens. In the sea a tide curls around a tail as if it’s stone instead of flesh. A tree bows not by the force of the wind but by the force of an exhale. Bones crack, crack, crack like thunder until she thinks that she is not running but becoming.
When she stops at the crest of the ravine she sees not a grave but a heart slumbering and a god dreaming. “Come.” Those beasts in her throat bellow the sound like a call-to-war. And it is not a unicorn, or a sister, that tucks her knees to her chest and leaps. It is the slumbering heart of a god that falls through the darkness like a star plummeting to earth. I
A wendigo looks back at the second chamber of it’s heart and beckons it to beat, and beat, and beat until the entire world shifts back into root, and color, and flavor.
