“Dawn”, the old man had told her once, “always brings with it a lesson.” He had tossed the phrase into the throat of one of his stories like a roar pretending to be a whisper. And she remembers now, as the mare leans into her touch, how she had waited with the fire ringing a halo around her horn to discover what the dawn would bring her that day.
She can see an echo of the old man in this mortal, a soldier who has enough emotions to fuel an eon of wars (wars she would watch begin and end from the altar of her temple). It lingers below the eye, the eyes mother always told her watch, like a shadow of the moon lingering behind a cloud. Danae wonders if her horn could pluck that out too like a ripe apple hanging from her father’s orchards.
She wonders if the mare would let her try.
“Who has sunk their teeth into you?” A flash of that rend, and ruin, of the night before snaps across her eyes like a violent storm. She remembers how that story, the one that started with a throat of dawn, had been full of dragons, and thunderbirds, and lions that flared like the sun in the dark middle of space. In her halo of fireflight she had felt like the belly of the story, the thing into which every creature caught in words must go. “Tell me and I will bring them to you with veins full of pollen and a mouth of daisies instead of teeth.” Her shoulder feels strong as stone, strong as that fire halo, when the mare’s tears start to dry.
Her smile has in it that echo of rend and ruin when she too pulls away from the dawn-gilded embrace. “I was made to carry both and I did not have to learn it as a born thing does.” The brightness flashes across her eyes again, and again, until she blinks it away and turns her gaze to the flower bowing backward at her shadow. “You have done nothing to me.” Danaë does not point out that it would take more than a mortal’s threat to bring her close enough to the death in her own stomach that it might make her discover fear. It seems like a cruelty and her throat is still echoing with the dawn.
Their shoulders brush again as Danaë shifts to look back at her castle where her sister and mother still slumber. “Did you know,” her smile dances with the secret of a true unicorn’s knowing, “there is more to the world than living or dying?” And this, as she tosses her horn into the halo of the dawn instead of one of fire, does not feel like a cruelty at all.
This feels, as more flowers tickle their hocks when they rise from the pathway mortar, like a gift.
@Meira
