some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
He crosses the spine bridge, whose ribs rise like fingers for him. His toes tap over spinous processes, the sound so much like a piano’s ivories pressed into tune. He has come far from his wild woods but this is the place of his birth and every season he returns it is so utterly different. Each time he takes a piece of it away with him, sometimes a physical memento, sometimes the island within him, sinking deep, like oxygen passing into his blood and then off into his every cell.
Leonidas will always return here. He was born into a strange world. He is spun from stranger magic, Time and ancient, feral things. The weeping wall calls him, its tears mixed with the crying of the wall beyond sound like haunting memories of how he and his sister went when their parents disappeared. But Leonidas was the only one who cried for longer. For Aster stopped and never started again. Her lovely face drawn with something dark, some terrible resolve that sunk into her body and soldered her bones.
In amidst the wandering crowds, this strange fae-boy can pass as nearly a man. Nearly. He is grown tall and muscular, but still youth claims him, turns his eyes wide with wonder and not enough wariness. He has learned of the wilds, of how to live within Nature’s palm, but he has not learned of people yet. Of how they might be the most dangerous things here, more terrible than any monster.
He moves onward, away from the wall that weeps her haunting tears. Away from the wall that screams his terrible ire out like a broken violin. Leonidas, gilded and wild, walks into the glow of the stones, on through the shops and the strange walled gardens, on and on he goes until the castle opens up her maw for him. Her mouth is full of light and creatures. Her teeth are glowing windows. He steps up and in and there, watching art is a girl so much like the one who hunted him in the wood. Leonidas knows a twin. This girl’s body answer’s her sister’s crimson, Isolt has left crimson dots, left like blood splatter across her sister’s ivory skin. Her horn is dipped in blood, her eyes as white and red and bright as a hunter’s moon.
It should stop him, but it does not. He goes to her as his sister came to him. The walls glow off her body and he wonders what death and danger clings to her. What whispers her Rift blood will sing into his. Time meets magic and the boy tips his gilded antlers to touch the art she watches. It scatters from him, like beetles, crawling across the floor, reaching, reaching for their feet, to climb, to claim, to turn them into living art.
It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
Her knees are still wet and stained with the blood of the weeping walls. Her horn is still dripping sorrow into splatters of art across the ruby, and emerald, and gold-leaf floor. The ache of her heart is still a tremble in her chest instead of a throb, drum instead of whining violin. Art, no matter how desperately she tries to find an answer in the twirling thorns of it, does little to settle the thing in her the cavern city has opened up.
The emptiness of her belly feels as yawning and full of teeth as the castle had when she dragged her horn through the eyes (bleeding retina into stone and pupil into wood) and demanded that it bow before a unicorn. Her blood feels just as wavering as the walls, and just as torn between being one thing and being another. And she’s not sure, as she feels the pegasus (it is always a pegasus) approach her, which thing her blood will have her become tonight.
He moves beside her, another shadow gilded in glitz in a castle full of them, and she only feels the way he moves the air around him more than he uses it to expand his lungs. Like an immortal thing learning the reflection of herself she savors the glitter of his horn the way a fox savors the shine of a mouse’s eye in the moonlight. She smiles when he scatters the art to the floor in a rainfall of beetles.
Her smile grows fat with teeth as they crawl and linger upon her bloody and damp knees like scarabs made of precious stone on a corpse.
This time, when one of them moves closer (she has forgotten which space is hers and which is his), she does more than feel the space between them gap like a jaw. This time, as the jaw closes and the teeth clack, she taps her horn to his antlers. Like he is art and she a pegasus come to draw profane scars across the gold wealth of him.
And when she drags her horn down to the first joint of tines her eyes shift towards the floor waiting to watch more beetles join the ones adorning her pale and bloody knees.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
She is blood spattered pearl. The weeping wall had wept more that tears upon her body. But when Leonidas looks to her, all he can think is how she wears the island’s magic blood. She has gutted its latest manifestation and she wears it with pride but without vanity. He looks for vanity, in the way he looks for a wolf or a lion to be proud of its kill, but all it seems is content with the hunt and its meal. Leonidas thinks this girl is made for wearing the blood of others; that this is she, perfectly as she should be.
He might have looked away from her, but for her horn that lowers to touch one of his golden tines. The brace of his antlers feels the presence of her horn. It is hot and hard like cooling obsidian thrown from a volcano. He expects her crimson horn to glow, but it does not, it just shines a wicked red, as if it has rested only recently within the heart of his beloved island.
Yet what stirs his heart most, is not the way it feels wicked warm, but how it rings out. Like Aspara’s did. Her horn slides down to the joint and he turns into her horn, lowering his head until the curves of her horn are tangled within the branches of his golden crown. The friction of their locking horns sounds like swords crying shrill and loud as they rub their edges in violent, life altering ire. But there is no ire in Leonidas’ eyes when he turns to look beneath the thick wave of his forelock. Her eyes are crimson too, bright as rubies.
She smiles and her teeth glow like moons, he wonders if she opens her mouth beyond her smile, whether there would be a castle within there too. He thinks she could possess the world between her ribs of ivory and blood. Leonidas does not know how the island makes her empty, how the art she watches with those blood-tide eyes fails to fill even the smallest parts of her.
The art runs like beetles up his knees and hers. Up and up it climbs. Across her knees, her skin becomes alive with light and magic and moving art. He pulls his antlers from her horn (it sounds so much like a sword drawn from its scabbard - more war, more danger like claws and teeth and blood-wet earth). The clutch of his antlers, the twists of her horn, makes their parting jerky yet fast.
She grins, wide, wide, wide. Leonidas watches her smile, he does not wear one to answer hers not yet, not yet, not yet. He watches the art climb and climb and climb, up and up her slim body. He thinks it might reach her throat, her cheek. He presses a triad ot tines to the joint between her shoulder and her neck. With a small breath he too waits to see what the magic does at his command. Would the beetles flee her body, back to the walls as they fled him first, or will they scatter across the canvas of her blood spattered body? Leonidas waits, his eyes rich with wonder, his tongue content with no words. For art, needs no words and he has been a boy silent and a lone in a wood for so long. He is content to let the art speak every word he cannot find.
It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
This is the simplest language for her to understand. Deep in the marrow of her made and ancient bones she knows each syllable whispered in the clack of bone and bone. She knows the sentences written when they lock together like stags instead of creatures born from earth and air. In his feathers this is poetry and in his blood a sonnet. And she listens to it with an ear cocked, away from the low tide hush, hush, hush of the castle walls, towards him.
He is singing but she knows, when he doesn’t dissolve into beetles to gather in straight army lines down her rib-cage creases, that he doesn’t really understand a single note. There is magic and then there is the end of magic where it flickers like a dying star into the nothingness. She does not wonder which she is made of.
Danaë blinks like a fawn in the twilight gloaming and she sinks easily into the magic that slumbers and sleeps in her bones. Somewhere a rat titters dead and rotten beneath the stone and the jaw of an old alley cat snarls back. Somewhere there are a million dead things begging to live again.
Somewhere her sister is adding to the number like the spring adds to a garden. But here a single pale-white rose blooms from the dead wood cracking through the stone floor like lightning. A finger of fungus points wickedly towards them from the frame where no art lingers. A vine trails towards the ceiling desperate to escape the bloody unicorn eyes that trace its path and all the black beetle eyes that follow it.
For a moment she is tempted to break the silence with something more than the whispering scratch, scratch, scratch of beetle feet over their skin. But instead she slips deeper in the language of unicorns and things with magic and violence in their marrow. Instead she lays the flat blade of her tail against his shoulder and presses hard enough that she can feel his skin dimple around her touch.
A horn did not turn a pegasus to beetle. An antler can turn art but not a unicorn into insects. And so she wonders, as she leans into him, what a weapon might turn his skin into.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
He should have known they were twins. Somewhere a part of him does, somewhere deep within his conscious that whispers of death and being remade. They each threaten him, one with death dripping as drool from her lips, the other as she places the blade of her tail to his shoulder and presses, presses, presses.
Leonidas feels the way the blade presses in, its edge whispering to his skin to break. It is a compelling, quick question, his body thinks. Its answer needs to be swift too. And, with the fast answer of synapse, his body yields. The blade sinks and his blood rises at its call.
Art stings. It is agony and delight. But he does not smile, he does not look to himself to see how she seeks to turn him into art and whether he becomes it or not. Already the feral boy’s body is a canvas upon which the wild wood has painted. But this girl seeks to turn him in to new art. Something altogether more magical, more wicked and dangerous. Blood beads out of the miniscule cut and crawls like spiders across her blade. The gleam ruby bright, red as a warning to any who dare to touch. Then, the broken skin begins to move, opening and closing and falling away into wings as butterfly moths red and white as bone emerge from the strange wound.
Leonidas lowers an antler to her in answer. He presses a tine to her cheek. It is the tip of a gilded blade. The metal of it flashes menacingly in the light. The rest of his tines reach like groping fingers (sharp and lethal) for her throat, her eyes, her jaw. Beetles run where he presses, he follows their path across her skin.
He tilts his head to watch from where he presses against her as beetles paint her, spiders bleed from him and crimson moths fill the air with the metal scent of blood and death.
It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
She should be sorry when the blade brings blood to the surface of his skin. She should be sorry when the scent of iron and rotten wood rises into the air around them, instead of the purr of beetle wings. But when she pulls back it is belatedly and the curl of her lips doesn’t quite manage to pull itself into the shape of apology. Mold stains creep down the walls towards and from somewhere above them water starts to fall (all brine and weed from the sea far, far above them like a tidal wave of cosmos).
When butterflies start to fly from him, milkweed starts to grow in the molded wood grout between the stones. Soon the smell of weed and flowers (those she’s grown to give a bed to the butterflies of him) fills the spaces between his fermented forest blood and the brined tears of the sea. Danaë, for the first time since she entered the belly of the monster-city, inhales hard enough to make her lungs ache. And she holds the air there, in the center of a monster-unicorn, with all the determination of the city to keep each particle of the outside in.
Perhaps she should wonder, at the thought, why she knows in her very bones that the island means to keep them all.
But she does not wonder, or exhale, when he lays his tines against her cheek and throat.
In that moment she knows exactly what her mother would tell her what to do. She knows that she could cleave the crown of antlers from his brow, and the bird-bones from his shoulders. She could unweave the sinew from his bones and let the sparrows of his organs free from their cages. In that moment she knows a hundred ways to unmake him, to return him to ink instead of the art made of ink.
Isolt would not hesitate. But Danaë is not Isolt and so she does.
And she breaks the silence with words where her sister would have only filled the nothingness up with screams. The sound of her voice is not a battlecry, but a sigh of wind through the spider-legs crawling across her lips and between the butterfly wings that linger across her nose. With her voice she lets go, finally (finally!), of the aching pressure of their insides caught in her lungs. Danaë, who is still hesitating, hopes he will catch it.
“Careful,” she says with a flutter of her pulse kissing down the tine pressed to it, “you will find no butterflies or spiders in me.”
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
His blood butterflies flutter down to the weeds and flowers that bloom at his feet. Leonidas could have watched the way they grow in ways that plants should not (burdened by blight and the young weeds growing up grey and already old) but he does not watch them. Instead his gaze runs down the long tines of his antlers and into her strange, lovely-wicked face.
The air becomes damp and salt-slick. Mould spores float in the air, dancing like slow, slow pollen. They are enough to tickle his nose and potent enough to spasm his lungs, bringing sickness into the very core of him. The feral boy knows this magic is hers, though there is nothing rotten about her. She is young, her body soft and warm and fresh. Her skin smells only of only strange, metallic magic and flowers growing dry in the sun (and maybe that was the warning he was not heeding). Run, wild-wood boy his forest blood hisses with every wet thump of his heart. Run before you too are wilted and bound up in vines.
As his blood spiders creep to her, the crimson butterflies choose to land amidst the crop she made for them. Their wings open and close a lub-dub so similar to that which he heard from the island when he was so terribly young.
She speaks.
He blinks long and slow. A stag with the pride of a monarch and the innocence of prey. He could bathe in her voice, imbibe her words, open her up to see how she works, how she makes the mould spores dance and plants grow already dead. “Will you tell me what I might find within you?” The colt asks, more stallion than boy as his voice rattles out low, low, low from his throat. Though he asks, a part of him does not wish to know her answer because he is too enchanted by the idea of imagining. A girl once asked him to paint her and he has been so in love with the sway and stroke of a brush since that it is far sweeter to imagine her as something only art and magic could ever think to create.
Slowly he removes his tines from her throat and steps closer, presses his muzzle to the side of her silken neck. He waits, to see how her body hums, vibrates, and then, foolish, daring boy he presses an ear against her skin to see what he hears within her, that echoes louder than the beating of her heart. Does her body murmur with the susurration of magic through leaves? Does her body scratch line wildlife over the flowers and roots of the field? He listens until he is content enough to recall the music of her in his sleep and then he parts from her, stepping through the wall where their art dances. The beetles cling to his skin and the wall begins to close herself up behind him. He pauses for a moment, turns his head to watch her with gold eyes, just a moment, just an eternity, before the wall sews closed and the girl is gone.
It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
Danaë has never quite understood the sound of the wolves in her heart or the bay of the wendigos rotting in a pit of corpses that echoes in the black behind her eyes. She has never understood hunger, and wanting, as deeply as her sister can (and mother more than that). But, when his voice echoes back in the almost-silence that had been filled only with the butterfly heartbeat of the too-alive organ in his chest, she understands.
And maybe this is the nature of unicorns, to want something outside the thick fronds of the forest reflecting in the feral shine of their eyes. Maybe it’s not hunger that they feel but a wanting so deep, and so dark, that they must eat a universe to fill it.
Had she any thoughts, but that baying of a wendigo, they would have been thoughts of sorrow and suffering for the wanting of his heart. At her back her tail tap, tap, taps a warning into the stone that cares nothing for the spiders and the butterflies She’ll never escape the darkness, she realizes, but she can love it anyway (when she sees it in the pooling spiders catching flies upon his antlers). When he pulls away she does not follow because she knows that she’ll never stop following if she takes that first step so soon.
Her heart, her hunger, that unicorn thing in her belly, tells her to cleave the wall out around him until there is nothing left but stones and vines holding together his bones. And she wants to listen, she wants to close the distance he takes by way of horn, and tooth, and blade.
She wants to be Isolt, who does not listen but takes.
Isolt, who might say like a war what she says like a sighing sonnet, “Your death and nothing else.” Isolt who would not have a look in her eye that says, and I would love you then. Isolt who would follow the boy just to water the mold with his magic and feed the spiders with the flies that would follow quickly on the heels of his death.
But Danaë cannot be her sister no matter the fervor in which she begs her heart to become it.
So she only watches the wall close around him. She only listens only to the lub-dub of his butterflies and his heart.
She listens so intently that by the time the wall has closed and he is gone that her tongue has already taught itself, by way of song, the sugar in his thick-forest blood.
