He lies, limbs tangled in leaves and branches and dreams such terrible dreams. Within them a man carves for a girl and a boy at once so similar and yet so different. From a block of wood the man makes two small statues. Two identical cheetah kittens emerge from the block of stone. The work is long, the detail so careful. But when the cheetah cubs are made and one is passed to the girl who takes it and disappears, the other is passed to the boy. He clutches it tight, but in its grasp, the wood rots and splits and comes apart within his hold. The statue the colt holds cries out as it breaks. Its cry is the bleat of a lamb, the crying of fear and sorrow.
Leonidas startles from his dream, the cries turning to yowls as the dream lives on within his ears. He lies still, there in the silvered darkness where frost settles her white jewels upon the ground. There in the milky moonlight where mist hangs low and pregnant over the forest floor. It is all so still this night, where the boy lies, his gold muted into grey. He lies still, awake, thinking of the statue of the cheetah cub, until he hears its cry within his ears again and knows, then, that it was no dream.
The silent forest echoes with the low, bleat and the higher growl. The boy rises suddenly, for he knows the sound of his cheetah; the statue his father gave him, brought to life by a magic that turned wood into flesh and bone and muscle.
He trails through the woods, listening to the cries, until there at the bottom of a ravine, caught like a lamb in a bramble bush, a nearly grown cheetah lies. It watches Leonidas with golden eyes and its lips peel away from long canines. It thrashes where it lies but the grasping plants do not release it. They dig into the cubs open wounds and the creature hisses and spits, feral and frightened. From atop the ravine Leonidas watches his cub, wondering why his soul does not twist with recognising its familiar.
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
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alking in the ravine has always felt like walking in the belly of some slumbering god. Below her hooves she can feel each bone of the forest, each jaw of a fallen fawn, each hollow socket of a fox trapped in a forgotten landslide. For one mile her knees ache with the feeling of walking through mud, and mire, and melted snow. The next mile has hunger gnawing at her belly as she passed over a flock of song-birds that a winter had taken. And the last mile has her blood screaming in agony and her flesh turning tender and frail.
Danaë feels like the forest ravine, and the belly of the god, are digesting her down to meat and flesh (and though she should wonder if this is how a stag felt with Isolt’s teeth at their belly, she does not).
At first she is too consumed with the feeling of being consumed. All she can see is darkness, and bones reaching for her with begging prayers caught between their broken teeth, and mud with a universe of worms building cities in it. But when the bellow of a caught and dying thing breaks through the darkness, suddenly her world is not full of being consumed but the sight of a predator being consumed as she had been.
She does not notice the pegasus above or the way he’s peering down instead of flying (and she would have cut a line of disappointment in his side if she had). Every inch of her focus is consumed by the raging wildcat in the brambles. For each cut the cat makes in the bramble a lilac blooms, fat and soft, until the animal is surrounded by flowers instead of thorns. Around them, in the fallen trees and rotten weeds, Calendula and yarrow and aloe start to grow.
Her breath makes the same hush, hush, hush sound that she makes at her sister when she gallops off to eat the world in her dream. And Isolt is far more dangerous than any animal caught in a bush and so Danaë does not hesitate to approach and start to cut away the brambles with her tail-blade.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
The ravine cuts through the landscape like a the remnant of a gouging claw from a great, ancient beast. Whether it was water, or some great monster that carved the path here, the boy does not know. He cares and thinks of little now his eyes are full of a creature he thought dead - a part of himself he thought was lost. But even looking at the creature now it still feels lost to him, the lines of its face so familiar and yet as strange as his sister’s had been to him also. The sight of the cub feeds an anger within him. It could be a unicorn’s fury for all that it prowls within him and lets its anger peel out in sound with the running of a horn along his ribs.
But Leonidas is no unicorn. He is wild and dangerous and curious in such different ways than all the girls he has met before him whose horns point like spears - some straight, some twisted like daggers - into the sky. The boy crouches over the edge of the bank. He peers down like an eagle, a crow, curious and aloof, but curious. His head tilts as the girl appears.
She is a hazy smudge of ivory, a droplet of milk in the shadow of the great, gouged ravine. She wades as if through mud. He looks to see if her slim knees are dark with dirt, enough to hide the splattering of darker skin, stained rich as blood or wine. At her feet flowers bloom, upon the brambles where the cheetah writhes, pitiful and weakening, the petals fall open, soft like death. Leonidas knows it is her magic that grows about his familiar. And when she brings her tail, the blade of it singing as it cuts the air and then whisper-laughing as it cuts brambles like silk. Effortless, dangerous.
The girl makes the scene of biting thorns and twisting vines, tight as a noose, into a thing of ribbons and flowers. Leonidas tips over the edge of the ravine, he skids down its deep wall and lands before her. Closer now he remembers the smell of her, the scent of plants turning toward death. The must of rotting things, the perfume of blooming flowers, caught upon their final turn.
He moves across her, before her and stops the descending path of her scythe with the brace of his gilded antlers. “No.” He murmurs, as he looks up to her eyes so filled with awed desire once as they watched how magic painted itself upon the canvas of their bodies. “Leave it.” The boy says, soft like a lion, gilded and sun drenched as one too.
His cheetah writhes, it cries out as petals press into his wounds, as his blood paints them red, red, red. The sound is claws raking into a wild boy’s soul and he flinches, a part of him dying. Leonidas wonders if he will bind that part of him back together with her flowers that grow like stitches, resisting death, curling like kisses along the dying parts of him.
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
The
sharp edges of the earth give him away before she notices the flash of gilded gold and sooty mud moving towards her. Each stone, each dead branch, each root tumbling down into the belly of the forest-god cracks open some longing ache inside her heart. It feels as if pieces of her have been flayed from her bones. She is aching as much as the struggling wildcat when he stops her blade.
And then she is not aching, or longing, or seeing only those stones tumbling down. Danaë sees red, blood-red, red brighter than the shine of her sister’s coat in the garden sunlight.
In their shadow the trapped animal cries out again, caught deeper into the brambles she had been cutting away from it. But when she turns to look at him it is not the look of a young-god saving a creature in her god-belly forest. When she looks at him it is the look of an immortal made, a unicorn, a beast whose blood beats of rend, and ruin, and consume, in the very dark and frail bottom of her soul. Like a predator, one not caught in thorns, she catches his flinch and smiles with her mouthful of teeth.
Danaë is no ghost in the forest anymore, no unicorn with her horn pressed soft as a kiss to art.
Bright nightshade petals grow between the lilacs when she pulls her blade from his tines and angles both of her bone swords towards him. “I am no hound for you to command.” Her voice is no louder than a whisper almost drowned in the bleating cries of the wildcat. Had he known her better, or known her as more than art to be bled out, he might have known her whispers are far, far more dangerous than all the snarls she does not know how to make. “And that animal is no it that I will leave.” Another whisper, another warning.
At her hooves, where all the dead leaves have rotted vines fat with berry and leaves start to bloom and weave around her legs. Steady, steady, steady, they whisper to her. Steady, a coyote skull in the ravine whispers the same song, the same warning as the vines.
Danaë steps closer to him as quietly as her whisper. Her nightshade and lilac grow, and grow fat, to bolster the caught animal from the thorns. “I am going to free him from the brambles and if you try to stop me again I will free him by drowning the bush in your blood.” This time her whisper is not a warning but a promise as her tail blade hangs close to his carotid artery.
And even filled with all this red, and ruin, her heart aches as the animal cries out again in agony.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
The rending part of his soul, the piece that belongs within the bramble-trapped creature, cries out like shattering metal. Leonidas is crashing, he is crumpling up within him. The air is pushed like a blow out of his lungs.
If it were any other creature, he would have saved it. As he looks up to her eyes that douse him in the red of her righteous fury, the pegasus knows he should be trying to save his bonded. There is no raging within him. There is no blind fury like that which pushes her to save, to save, to save.
The girl smiles when he flinches. Each glint of a bone-white tooth is a dance of delight about the bonfire of his pain. She is beautiful as she mocks him with her immortal white and perishable red. The pegasus does not meet the unicorn’s smile with one of his own as they stand at odds within the bowels of the forest’s belly; the god-belly as she thinks of it.
He is of a once-god and those genes, stirred up with his magic have turned him immortal too... but he has never felt more mortal than she makes him now with that smile, with that tail blade she presses into his throat. It is not the touch of a girl seeking to turn his body into art. It is the press of a girl seeking to turn a boy into an example of righteous punishment.
It is odd, how in the most serious moments, the most insignificant moments rise up in sharp relief. She scolds him - as so many girls have done. He does not shy from her as he has done from girls before. He does not cry out with childish rage as he has before. But he does think how he should have said, please. The wild-wood boy thinks how his uncle has schooled him in politeness. How Aspara told him not to steal. Yet none of it comes easily to a boy who has lived his whole life alone and, therefore, only for himself.
Her gaze drowns him in rich red wine. It swallows him down until all his gold is gone. She steps nearer and he sinks only deeper. Though he stands, still and immovable. His bonded is silent. The tragedy is that the boy has forgotten its name. He holds her gaze as she chastises him again. This time he does not flinch and does not lower his gaze to let it run along the ivory of her teeth. But the boy thinks, if he did, it would sound like rain upon parched earth, an adagio of death and life. She is soft and wicked all at once.
How long ago had he made the link? How long ago had the boy realised that he has met her sister too? The girls, two halves of a penny, each one bearing a tongue that has sworn his death. He and she are not too dissimilar, Leonidas thinks, as her magic lifts flowers from the earth. They rise as serpents beneath the music of her magic and curl sweet and soft and beautiful about her feet. But the pegasus does not yield like her flowers. He stands before her as proud as a stag but one with eyes so deep, so sorrowful, so filled with aching as she is with rage. They are two seas meeting, his gaze and hers. Red wine spilling, mixing with ichor.
Behind him, about his wounded creature, the gripping vines begin to die. They wilt and shrivel, growing soft, falling away. Leonidas’ magic reaches out beyond the shrub and the cub it violently cradles with thorn and strangling root. Time feels like wind about them, breathing across their cheeks, pushing existence to its limit, urging it faster, faster. His hair, her hair, together they grow; 6 months’ length within a moment.
Then it stops.
It all stops, except the way he watches her, sad, broken, but unyielding. “My death belongs to your sister alone.” Leonidas says softly at last, a whisper into the small space she has left between them. The rumble of his adult voice vibrating her blade in a low hum.
She makes him a thief again, stealing a piece of her aching pain as he turns from her, hoping it will break through the numbness that has settled in his broken soul. He might know the numbness is there so he does not feel how it lies thin as ice across a chasm, a chasm filled with sorrow and despair and a pain so blisteringly bright he set the world alight with it.
But he gives her a taste of his pain when he murmurs so softly that it is a blessing she stands so close, just near enough to catch the lament, “How would you feel if your parents were trapped in another world… if your twin got lost and with her your soul-bonded...” And he knows what it is to be curled rib to rib and limb-tangled with a twin, as he looks to his cub he wonders if it, too, feels the loss of its twin. “I have searched for them every day.”
And as Leonidas looks to the cub, he wonders why it is not joy he feels, but despair. The ice is breaking upon that black chasm of depthless, deathless grief.
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
A
part of her, that unicorn part, snarls when he turns steady and sorrowful instead of challenging. That part of her does not think it would have minded the sound of another command falling from his lips so that she might have reason to cut them away from his teeth. But it can only snarl, and drag the single claw it has, against her bones as his magic quickens her blood into a fever rushing so fast that her wrath cannot keep up.
Her fury fades with each whisper of hair against her knees. It fades with every bit of rot that creeps across the bramble bush and reminds her, once more, of how perfect a thing her sister’s magic can make of the world (and Isolt wields is so much better than this nameless, gilded boy). And she does not smile in the wake of it to tell him that there is not a thing in this world she and her sister would not share.
Danaë does not think Isolt would be disappointed in his antlers as a gift. They could turn him into a risen to die, and die, and die again for the price of their wrath. A universe of his death’s could belong to her sister then.
Perhaps if his magic had not carried her wrath away she might have discovered how many times a risen could die. But it is gone, gone with the thorns and the thicket, and all she has left are the healing flowers that have risen to heights far greater than a summer would have given them. She follows him as he turns, closely enough that she hears his whisper. And it does not make her feel pity, or wrath, or any understanding that a girl should have for a sad, lonely boy. His words only make her realize the difference between flying horses (for he is a horse now in every way that matters to her) and unicorns.
No unicorn would be so melancholy over a lost bit of soul. A unicorn would have just devoured each world, every world, until all them were forced to spit up everything they ever stole. A unicorn would not search but conquer. His lament makes her smile at the thought of it, of the way her sister would destroy each thing in the dark of space to find her if she was lost.
And Danaë would not have watched a wildcat suffer just to make some broken piece of herself feel whole. But it seems cruel to tell him all of this, a horse is too gentle for some truths. So instead she only steps from him to cut the healing plants her magic had grown in the deadwood. She lets him keep his silent whisper of sorrow to himself as she turns the herbs to a tincture the old librarian keeper had taught her when a child came to him with tears in her eyes.
Danaë does not want to hold an inch of his sorrow, even when she moves back to where he peers with too-heavy eyes at the injured wildcat. And had she known, or tried to understand, that the animal was his bonded she would have filled up with wrath again as the cruelty of lonely horses.
“Are you going to try to stop me again?” Her whisper is no less quiet than his but somehow the purpose in it, the unicorn surety, makes the sound of her seem heavier than the universe her sister would destroy. The look in her eyes though, as she steps closer to the injured cheetah, is full of a promise that if roused again his magic would not be able to take away another ounce of her wrath.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
Leonidas sees how her anger abates, swept off in the tide of his magic. Her hair curls its way down, down, down her shoulder down to her knees, each bend in the fine strands is like the silver folds of Time his magic commands. The boy feels the passing of time, skipping over itself in its haste.
This girl is unmoved by him or his sorrow. But wildling boys expect nothing less of unicorn girls like her and Isolt. Yes, already he has realised that they are twins. The taste of their magic is soft as death, the smell of it like rotting feted things, black as bruises. Danae fills herself up on thoughts of death and death and death. Maybe she thinks little of him for his magic. But his is not constrained only to destruction like these twin girls of death. His magic brings life as well as ends it. He does not realise it now, but when he does, Leonidas will see how his magic reaches deep into the fabric of existence. It extends beyond universes, beyond creation and life. All come yielding to him and his own twin. Together, when he finds her, when he remembers his own sister of ivory like Danae’s but gold where she is red, then he can bring their magic death to a halt. They could cease all around them if they ever so wished.
Oh, and if he knew too, hidden behind her lovely rose red, blood red eyes that she thinks him a prize for his sister, he would laugh - even in his sorrow. He would laugh for already he has given himself away to Isolt. Already the girl can carry his tines like a necklace about her throat. His death is hers, a death that surpasses immortality. Isolt comes for him, licking at his heels.
So the fea-boy turns to the sister of his Little Death (for that is what he calls Isolt now, as she shadows him with her darkly wanting eyes) and feels no ounce of fear when Danae laid her blade upon him. His death is not Danae’s to have, not even to give to Isolt. It is for Isolt alone.
She has created a wild flower meadow around them. They run their petals along his side like wings of decaying butterflies. Leonidas, for a moment, looks to the dark of the woods around him and expects her sister to peel out between the privet and the blackthorns. But Isolt does not come and Danae steps towards hit wildcat.
Not impervious to the effects of his own magic, his own despair, his own sorrow has turned into a fermenting, less acute thing. He feels it, like liquor in his veins, but it does not command him like it did before. He wishes to stop her still and yet, and yet, a part of him is grateful that she forces this, that not all of her lies in destruction. Within her, pressed in between her ribs, behind her unicorn eyes is a softer, thing, like the wild meadow flowers she grows about them.
He says nothing as she makes her herbal paste. He says nothing as she steps forward, though his magic is there before her, speeding up his cheetah’s wounds. The skin knits together, his body healing days in a matter of moments. But his magic alone is not enough. Not yet. Her herbs are needed and his cheetah reaches its muzzle toward the unicorn. Leonidas’ soul’s tether stands, meekly, carefully. It is a newborn lamb between them, weak enough to be slain. A chirp leaves its maw like a bleat.
“Would Isolt have saved her?” A wildling asks a unicorn.
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
W
ounded animals, even ones more tame than wild, are easier to look upon than feral boys with leaves and knots in their hair. Their blood, where it lingers in the air and stains the tip of her almost-snarl with flavor, is softer on her pallet than his has been. Their pain she can understand. It is the same ache, the same feel of flayed flesh, that churns round and round in her stomach like a newborn hurricane.
She can feel it now on the tingle that moves from tongue, to throat, to stomach, when she starts to lay the tincture on the wildcat. And she tries not to grow poppies, and lilacs, and violets as bright as her mother’s eyes in the cracks of injury drawing out constellations in his fur.
Still the urge is there when she blinks her eyes onto the image of both life and death superimposed upon each other.
Danaë does not look at the boy again when the cheetah comes closer with eyes soft with pain, and promise, like a lamb who sees a unicorn instead of a lion slumbering. Each touch is gentle as she spreads the paste with her lips instead of magic. A part of her soul rejoices that she still has the ability to save a thing instead of consume it or raise it up from the belly of the dirt. Sometimes when she had ran through the forest, shoulder to shoulder with Isolt and a bramblebear, she had wondered if the same spore of life in her own chest was nothing but a cruel joke of her mother’s old-god magic.
She had wondered if she would ever save, ever consume, anything but death.
But she does not linger over the discovery of it when he steps close again and her paste runs down to shadows. The part of her clinging to a fake mortality hopes that she had been faster than his magic-- fast enough to prevent festering bacteria from healing inside the skin (and again she thinks, foolish, foolish, horse). The almost tether between boy and wildcat, the way their hearts stutter and beat almost in tune, tells that fake mortality to look away, look away, look away. Only wisteria lungs, and evergreen lungs, beat in tune with her own.
The shadows feel like a blessing from a god she does not believe in when they fill up again the space between them. Her body trembles as she pulls it from the lingering grasp of his magic. It is a tremble that has nothing to do with pain, or regret, or the chill of the darkness in the scar running through the forest. All the hair rises from her spine, like weeds instead of hair, when she shakes the tang of herbs and blood from her tongue.
And she has never felt like a thing so strange compared to her sister when she blinks (and again it’s the image of hollies from his eyes and lichen from his feathers). “Never.” She answers so softly that the darkness takes that too when she turns back into her forest.
Her tremble does not abate until the trees are woven so tightly together that her gallop must turn to a walk.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
The paste tingles upon her lips and upon the worried and open skin of the cheetah’s limb. The air is full of the smells of herbs and healing things. It is laced through with a magic that tangs like needles across his tongue. Absently the feral boy wonders if this is how Time tastes upon the tongue, or merely his own incarnation of it…
She might have wished herself faster, but Leonidas’ magic will urge bacteria to bloom faster, a wound to necrose quicker, healthy skin to grow more swiftly… As the cheetah rises, unsteady as a lamb upon newborn limbs, it is clear that she was fast enough. The wound is pink and bright with health. Nothing is necrosed and no bacteria festers, turning to rot and ruin beneath the newly healed skin.
Leonidas blinks at the cheetah as it reaches for the girl. Within its cradle of bone and tissue his heart is beating a stuttering rhythm. His bonded turns its gaze to him and the fae youth’s blood runs with electricity. It sparks across his skin, turning him to embers where he stands, caught in the light of his bonded. A piece of his soul tries not to remember and yet it is rebound by old, broken and fraying ribbons to the piece of his bonded.
The open maw with its gnarled teeth of twigs and roots lies still and open and ugly. It no longer clasps his lost bonded within its jaws, but rests pliant and placid. Never the Dawn girl whispers and the darkness steals it swiftly from her lips. But he heard it, soft as birdsong, light as petals. He turns to her, to where she should be, still with the paste upon her lips. Upon his own is a thank you. But she is gone, flighty as a doe into the woods. His gold eyes darken tarnishing until they are a deep mahogany. Her woods are lovely, dark and deep, he will not find her tonight to press his thank you earnestly upon her. So instead the boy turns his gaze back to his bonded and wonders why everyone flees.
Why he fled Aspara.
Why Isolt fled him.
Why Danaë fled him.
Why he and his bonded fled each other.
Slowly, chastened by the Dawn girl, he touches his cheetah’s crown and the cat purrs like distant thunder. As one they turn, black and brown and gold, and slink away together into the swelling, gestating darkness.
