On her cheeks each of her tears turn to fire, and water, and the weeping remains of thunder. Sorrow as it turns to an undertow in her heart, a pull that drags each seedling rupturing her aorta down into her heart, takes each ounce of her father’s wisdom and changes it like a chrysalis. In her chest every sparrow in the monster’s mouth breaks loose and shakes spit and froth from their wings. Her magic roars, and roars, as she discovers that bravery feels nothing like a nurse log in her chest.
The sparrows sing and their song is only one of a hope so bitter, and sweet, that she cannot name the flavor when she licks the drops of silver-blood from her lips where it fell from her horn. It blossoms faster, and brighter, than all the flowers they can grow together.
Discovering how easily her father holds up the weight of her, of all this sorrow and hope and bravery, seems like a revelation. Isolt had seemed the only one who understood, who could hold all her softness when it became heavier than any steel sword forged out of a star-belly. It feels lighter when her father holds it, like his magic is the root upon which the pale and fragile flowers of her own have bloomed.
And suddenly the world of weeping houses does not seem so terrible.
Perhaps, to a unicorn who grows only in death, this is a world made to fill every hunger she had not known she was starving from.
“I do not feel brave.” She says because she doesn’t. Her blood is racing with more than bravery when it is billowed up with a storm of hope. But it is not thunder echoing in her veins like it echoes in mother and Isolt, it is the sound of a storm watering a universe of gardens. It is pouring as she leans more and more of her weight against her father. The upside down sapling flutters in the breeze of her magic as it races to keep up with her father’s.
Her horn brushes the shell of his ear, a unicorn’s kiss, when she closes her eyes to feel every inch of corpse, and wood, and monster jaw, begging for the same touch. “I want to be Danaë.” In the darkness of her closed eyes she can see the shape of her, the wicked tip of her horn between the soft tangles of mane. And for the first time she is content with that.
“I want to be what comes after life and after death.” If she had not been a unicorn she might have called that heaven, or utopia. But instead when she opens her eyes to see how the blood has risen to their bellies it seems too profane a thing to be holy or religious.
She does not try to pull away as her magic starts to bottom out keeping up with her father’s. And even when she grows weary, and the eye-sun settles outside, she does not pull away. What comes after life and after death is not a creature that pulls away.
It is a creature that stays until every cosmos has turned to a garden brushing against her hocks.
@Ipomoea
