Are in the dark together,—near,
The silence, poured from a statue’s mouth, feels golden as it settles like a sentient thing between them. It devours their exhales and whets its teeth upon their inhales. She can feel it testing the space between her, and Hati, and the gilded stallion for flavor. It leans closer, so slowly that no truly living thing could tack its movement, to catch another breath, another bit of carbon in the air.
And for the first time Danaë discovers that her heart, her yearning soul, have in them the capability for avarice. She discovers, as he does not turn his back to the statue, that she wants to be the thing respected. Perhaps, she thinks, Isolt has the way of it-- to devour, and rend, and ruin, until there is nothing left in the world but fear. Isolt would run him through hip to apex until he was nothing more than a flag of surrender waving on her horn.
She steps closer, both a warning and a begging echo of prayer. His shadow dissolves her own when she steps close enough to rest her cheek upon the hard point of his hip. There is warmth there, a whisper of life, that sparks some distant and buried hunger in her heart. Hati sets to purring and the sound echoes through each of his out-of-place bones. This bison ear turns to wolf and his rabbit ear turns into a hound’s ear straining toward a creak in the forest. His nose feels like an entire universe as he lays it against her hip as a shadow of the way she touches the stallion.
Beneath that universe weight she whispers to the stallion’s bones. “Listen closer,” she prays to everything sleeping beneath his skin begging for a dream. Her horn blazes like the glimmering sword of a sun as it refracts in the light bouncing from a statue's eyes. “They are screaming for freedom, whispering the secrets of the gods, and laughing at the sight of us so small and fragile in their monolith shadows.” And when she lays her ear against his skin she can hear the echo of each of those like a mirror image stretched across the library well.
In her wake the flowers start to pour from the statue’s mouth like rabid froth. Each sounds, to her alone, like a tear falling to the belly of the valleys. She can hear wishes torn from hearts, wood wailing a sorrow, a river flowing silver and slick, in the fall of the petals. And even though part of her wants to ask him if he can hear the falling petal-tears, she only turns the ear against his hip into a touch of lips.
In her kiss, as she presses in until her shadow is indiscernible from his, she asks, “If you could whisper as they do, what would you say?” And still against her hip, in an echo of her touch to mortal skin, she can feel the vibration of Hati’s purr as if he’s nothing more another statue in this world of hill and stone.
@Erasmus
