Each drop of blood falling from her shoulders to the wooden slats of the floor sounds to her a star crashing through the atmosphere. Her ears ring with the ticking life dripping, dripping, dripping from the half torn out throat of the hare. Her heart, that tangled rotten mess of roots and seeds and chambers, stumbles like another dying thing in her chest. And she can hear, in the echo of her own pulse, the melancholy sound of dying.
She does not see books, and ink, and mortal trappings she cannot understand, as she follows him through the mess. Even the stairs leading up (so much shorter and frailer than the steps of her father’s castle) seem nothing more than a mere whisper under the echoing of the hare’s agony and the stumbling war-cry of her violent heart. But like a lost thing she follows him because her magic begging her to grow roots in each drop of blood painting out a constellation on the wood does not understand how to help living creatures.
And she tries not to hate him when his voice stutters like her heart and his words promise to look at the dying hair. But her horn angles towards the point of his hip because she cannot help the wolf-cry of her heart pleading for violence in the almost empty promise of his help. “You will do more than look at him.” Below the warning of her horn her teeth snarl instead of smile or beg as lovely things are oft to beg.
Their hooves land on the attic floor and her own echo like thunder in the frail mortal home as she gently pries the dying hare from her shoulder. He makes hardly a sound as his broken body falls against the wood. Danaë barely turns her gaze, bloody and red, from the pools of his blood burning shapes into the wood. Her magic starts to rouse like a bear from slumber in her blood. It purrs at the sight of each trembling breath falling from the hare.
“You will save him. And at this she turns to fully look at the mortal who, at this point, has been little more than an afterthought in the wake of her demands. She follows the uncertain lines of his neck and the almost fragile way his eyes crease instead of snarl. The mortality of his form blazes against the blackness of her eyelids as she blinks and whispers to herself to be kind, be gentle, be like her father instead of her mother.
Behind her, in the cracks of his wooden attic, lotus flowers start to root and unfurl. Her magic begs for liver, and pupil, and stomach instead of old, dead wood. Her teeth ache as she grinds them together and whispers, no, to the monsters in her blood.
When she steps away from the hare her hooves still echo faintly like thunder. “Please.” And this time, when her horn points back at him, it is to ask instead of demand and to beg instead of render apart.
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