[P] (festival) coming home in the raw twilight,

[Danaë]

and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.


Tonight the world is more colorful beneath the flickering stars than it had been the night before. Tulips of bone-white and blood-red glitter in the sickle moon as they tap against her legs in the breeze. Each tap is a mockery of a flicker, of the darkness left behind when a star slips between one world and the gap-jaw of a monster’s throat leading the way to the next. And the mockery of light is the only reason she lingers knee deep in the field of tulips when the fog starts to roll in.

Around her the twilight has turned into bruise-black night and it’s citizens have long since started to think of silk, and pillows, and four walls a unicorn has no need for. The music has turned into low laments running in vesper frail whispers between the baskets tossed around as haphazardly as a hundred promises. To her, as she angles the tip of her horn towards the sickle moon, it all seems a very mortal sort of slumber. 

Perhaps it is because the hour is one of mortal slumber, and dreams spitting on silk pillows, that Danaë finds herself lingering between the tulips too rotten to be plucked. 

And perhaps it is why out of each dead and broken stem of a tulip another bottom-of-the-ocean-black petal unfurls. Each of those dark-as-night flowers unfurls towards her and in each center there is a rotten and porous pollen egg that seems more eye than honey. She thinks of her sister’s gardens, ripe with ruin and the bent backward spines of birches bowing for their god, and how this place is so far removed from it. 

Even the fog rolling in, thick enough to dust her lashes in dew (as if she is a garden instead of  a unicorn), does little to turn this meadow into an altar. But her lips still lick at the moisture like holy water and her tail still cleaves the head of the tulips from their spines when a pack of coyotes howls in the distance. She anoints and becomes anointed because she does not know, as all made things do not know, how be anything else but god.
 
Isolt, and mother, have taught her well. 

When she turns and casts her eyes, as bright and bloody as a cleaved out moon, onto the stallion as he joins her, there is that made look (that god-look) still echoing like a roar in her gaze. Danaë blinks and the fog billows up into crowning spirals through her horn with she lifts her nose from the throat of a cleaved off tulip. 

And she has never felt more like a thing biding her time than she does now as a smile turns her teeth into a moon shorn violently from the gloaming fog and darkness. 


@Arawn

[Arawn]

underworld


do i still taste of war.  can you feel the battles on my skin stitched across my back 

Darkness has a thirst.  A face.  A name. Ten thousand years in the fire, my soul surrendered beneath their flames.  She woke me up with a single whisper of command, and drawn by her ravishing light – I obeyed.  The light came from the moon, with wishes on her lips, and desire written in the skies.  I took the sky. I took the blood.  I took the moon – till my heart, my body, my soul – were overwritten by the devouring of hers. Together, we skinned stars with our teeth and swallowed the dead dreams of mortals with silk whisper, and tainted breath.  Her hair was pale.  Her skin, snow-white and the rest of her – unholy, beautiful – were bathed blood-red.  

Arawn remembers dying. He remembers being consumed by fire.  He remembers burning in the fire for thousands of years.  He remembers embers eating away at his dead skin, while his immortal heart howled with agony – snarled with rage.  He remembers the memories of explicit pain.  The lash of violence.  The shackles that bound their iron against his wrists. Now, by the gloaming of nightfall, in a body more made than born, Arawn laughs with devilish hunger on his lips.  His laughter falls like winter in the dead of night; where evening shadows collect their sins beneath his gaze.  When Arawn finally awakens, he awakens to the smouldering kiss of moonlight against his flesh.  To the kiss of a too-rough breeze, tangled like cloying fingertips against the disheveled length of his mane.  He awakens to the night bleeding silk against his skin. And by the primal glare of the hunter moon – by the swollen luminosity of their tainted scripture, their wild religion, their ancient cries – Arawn stirs. Arawn wakes. 

Arawn howls.

His blood pulses with life.  His blood burns.  Arawn rises with a growl on his breath, feeling his new body with a dark smile.   Rising from an ancient slumber, an ancient curse, he stands tall.  He feels the curse rolling down his bones – sliding off his shoulders, like thunder caught between his storm-made lips. He feels the sins of his past lives washing like blood down his form.  Drowning the earth in whispers of darkness, of memories, of blood sacrificed and legends, curses, untold.  The forests remembers him, too.  In purring want, the woodland coils before his smooth frame.  The woodland hisses his name and presses fervent kisses along his brow, his muscles, his shoulders, his powerful chest.  They ache to touch him.  To bathe him in tainted light so unholy it could devour warmth, it could devour suns. From the forests, with a low growl he arrives – his muscles flexing beneath taut, male skin; rivulets of crimson hair a wild, dishevelled mess. His eyes were silver storms upon violent seas – cold, savage, weathered by age.  Dark, heathen, not meant for this universe.  They were the eyes of a man who lived for passion, for hunger, for death.

Around him, darkness falls in vivid wrath – smouldering amaranthine – as the nightsky grew bruised.  Blooming blood-red, then black with dusk's approach.  The breeze tangles through his too-long hair.  Whispered their ancient secrets against his flesh.  And like a long, lost lover beneath the ruin of the sun – Arawn breathes in the twilight hour.  Tasting, devouring.  Wrapping his teeth against each nocturnal melody.  Each tainted perfume.  Inhale.  Exhale.  Her.  Every visceral taste of rot and honey melts like pools of amber beneath the hungry, ravaging flames of his heart.  He laughs. He wants.  His soul bellows like a beast bloated beneath its winter kill. His hunger is a disease – a ravening whisper – laughing between the shallow moonbeams of his feral love.  It aches in his chest now, like a rotten cavity, a visceral wound.  It aches for want, for memory, for touch – to remember the lives he had lived. The bodies he had taken.  The souls he had eaten, consumed.

But it is not the sweet stench of flowers that draws him near; the scent of mortals hanging like rot upon stagnant air, or the vestal moon that rises like a pale lover in their midst.  That begs his wild heart to command, to still – like blood singing for the touch of darkness. It is not the magic of the meadows, wet with mist and midnight dew, that stirs in want for the nectarous moon.  When the tulips hiss from the earth, their tight stems swaying to the alluring rhythm of a saccharine breeze, he sees her then – and the taste of her image burns him, like the moon burns the sun.  Like forest religion. Like pagan worship,  burying the world beneath the slender, iron crush of her goddess' weight.  She is haunting admonitions.  She is bone-white scripture.  She is curling threat, and graceful reprieve made deadly and soft.

She stands beneath the ashen haze.  A girl with the whisper of womanhood sighing down her hips.  Between the thin, sparse trees, and empty meadows, she lingers among the flower-ruins of the darkness, the mist.  Arawn does not laugh then, nor does he smile.  His eyes were smouldering flames, his grin thin and feral – a tight-lipped, wolven snarl curling before the cruel face of winter.  He approaches her in a slow, sweeping motion.  His rugged muscles, purring beneath scarred skin.  His skull were tilted towards the lunar light – his horn, piercing the heavens like a deadly sabre wound unto the battlefield.  His mouth were drawn into a firm line.  More criminal than gentleman. And his voice, dark, deep – a rich, smoky timbre.  Flowing more like darkness than they do words. "I do not know which suits you more –" He begins. His voice rough, low.  His lips, a grinning whisper away from her ear. 

"The flowers, the moon – or the violence,"  His gaze falls to her tail-blade then, the way it curls around those rotted stems like a scythe. The way it begs for flesh with a chilling cry of intimacy. And atlast, in the moments caught between moonsong and the swan-stillness of her beauty, he smiles. As if all the allure and violence in the world could not hold a candle to the divine light that pours righteous through her.  He almost wants to bow.  To kneel, like a knight does to a princess – a queen.  To tuck a crimson flower behind her ear with a chaste kiss.  But Arawn is a godless man.  A man who does not surrender.  Not for beauty. Not for love. Not even death.  His hunting dogs bay at his feet, bewitched. They bristle, furs sleek as black-blood by dawn.  Drawn to the girl with moonlight for skin. Blinking back with drowsy mongrel eyes as they come to an abrupt heel.  Obeying their master. Their lord.  "Arawn."

@Danaë

Am i still rebuilding bone by fragile bone

[Danaë]

and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.


There has always been a way about things that know the feel of death slipping between their ribs like a blade that gives them away. Sometimes she thinks it’s a glimmer in the gaze, a nipping of spectral hounds that no dream, no sunlight, no wish, can hide. Other times she thinks the knowing is in the curl of the spine where it runs into the hip, a strangeness of the gait, a hitch that neither violence nor grace can tame. In her mother it looks like the curl of her horn in the moonlight and the blackness that clings to her skin like ichor a golden god. In Isolt it is the ever-present hunger in her smile that says over and over again, nothing is enough, nothing will ever be enough.

And sometimes she is jealous, terribly so, when she looks at all the things in this fragile mortal world and sees the death on them that she can never find in the ruby-shine of her gaze, the curl of her horn, or the shadows pooling at her hooves like memories instead of corpses.

Danaë can see it in the look of him, in him, around him where the darkness coagulates between hound and master. She can see it in his horn and his hair where the forest has been caught in it like a hare in a hunting trap. At the sight, at the glory of the thing she cannot find on herself, her teeth ache and her mouth waters for the flavor of it.

If she had drank immorality from her mother's womb and a stag’s heart, what would she be able to drink from him?

What would she be able to take?

The curl of her mouth bows into a smile at the same time her horn rises into a warning. “I would like to think”, she pauses to sigh as much as she pauses to inhale again the perfume of rotten tulips and fermented seed, “that it all suits me as much as the fog and the sickle moon suit you.” Her smile bends and bows to a deeper look, a feral look, a look that she has stolen from the reflection of her sister-- the look of hunger, and wanting, and danger enough to collapse the world with fear. On her face it feels strange but she wears it anyway as she steps closer to his bristling hounds, and his echoing look of hunger and wanting, and the same shadows that cling to her mother like ichor.

When her horn taps against his it is music, and a knell, and a sonnet she had hunted for in the forest one night. She does not hear the same war her mother hears, or the hunger of her sister, or the blooming garden notes of her father. She only hears an echo of horn against horn, weapon against weapon, that promises living far more than it promises death.

“You may call me,” like a young line in their new forged sonnet deep in the gloaming tulip garden, “Danaë". She does not look away from him when his bristlingiling hounds come to heel like children instead of hounds. Her bowing smile folds deeper into the mockery of obedience.  And at her hooves, against her bone-white knees, a rose blooms out of the corpse of a cleaved off yellow tulip.



@Arawn

[Arawn]

underworld


do i still taste of war.  can you feel the battles on my skin stitched across my back 

There is a thirst in him, a darkness, that no living thing can sate. His soul is an empty vessel.  Wraiths purr beneath his cursed skin.  The earth reaches for Arawn's physique, like begging fingertips reaching for salvation.  The darkness caresses his flesh like soot quickening over burnt, diseased flesh.  He remembers the way the earth crawled with insects over his dead heart.  Remembers how the soil drank deep from his veins, grew damp with his organs; rooting into the marrow of his bones, until their roots became bloodthirsty parasites latched unto decayed meat.  Fire, death, torture, resurrection, will change a man – he feels these changes now.

It's in the rolling gesture of his shoulders – erratic, oozing muscularity. The deep-rooted hunger within his thirsty gaze.  The way his tongue flickers snake-like between his fangs; sighing, with dark passion and cruelty.  The way his expressions do not fit over his scarred face, that snarled more with echoes of war than they do the greed of men.  More feral, more wolf, than man.  Arawn barely remembers who he was before the darkness, the madness, devoured him. Arawn breathes in shadows like a wolf breathes in spruce, birch, soil, deadwood.  Each scent becomes memory, a lover.  Each cry, tear, a drop of blood spilled, becomes tainted flavour inhaled deeply within his lungs.  A curse, wrapped like twine and bones against his mane.  Spilling fresh rivers of blood, down his powerful shoulders.  He drips of sin, the way she drips of innocence.

Arawn drinks the forest, a gluttonous predator.  He savours the moonlight like a pagan deity drinks sacrificial offerings before the devout-sick villagers. Skinning souls between his teeth, his famished jaws, and feeding upon their intimate screams.  Of this, he remembers.  Arawn is constantly consuming, devouring. And so, it is no wonder he gazes to the maiden with dark severance. Licking his bottom lip like a serpent whispers dark promises to lilith, to eve. He feasts on her divine image as darkness feasts on the blinding radiance of light – swarming, drinking, eager for the promise of her celestial perfume. For that radiant touch of youth, she so gracefully embodies.  And is she not breathless?  Is she not pureness, incarnate?  Is she not wicked angel trapped in succulent, pale curvature? He could watch the moon for an eternity, consumed, by the silver gleam of her skin. The ruby-red pomegranate seeds, that were her bright, shining eyes –

She radiates this beautiful purity, this otherworldly innocence both holy and corrupt. Arawn does not know purity like this – where innocence is both deadly, and righteous, like the sword of God dipped in heavenly promise, celestial ink and aimed straight for his heart.  The flowers around her spurn for her wickedness.  They fall beneath her like she's the source of death, or life.  He wonders if it's in the sigh of her ribcage, so tender and delicate; or the curving of her lips, plush with the pureness of a dawn-rose in full bloom.  Subjugated by sin, by violence, Arawn embodies the supernatural thirst.  He embodies the hunger, the intimacy of the forests, the bellowing cries of the starved woodlands deep that ached to spill blood and taste flesh.  Consume souls.  It's always the soul he craves, for he has no use for beating, mortal hearts.  And what is a heart, but a thing to be devoured? Owned? 

"Yet you are the moon in all her forms," His voice is a laughing whisper away.  Darkness follows Arawn like a disease, a lover.  He remembers nothing of himself; nothing, except that every breath inhaled carried with it the scent of soot and ash.  Every moment lived, was that of torture and punishment. Every moment, laced with primal screams echoed throughout the seven hells. He consumed all of it.  Wrath, became his fiery prison.   "–and darkness, always bows before the moon,"  His voice is pure sin. Laced in smouldering masculinity. Low, deep – guttural.  The throaty purr of a wolf, who growls instead of speaks.  Whispering fangs, and bristling hackles for language.  He turns his scarred face towards her then, ears swivelling atop his skull, just as her horn motions towards his own.  They lock in a temporary clash, like swords wrung out against the tameless night.  He steadies her with a dark smile. His breath, smooth upon her pale cheek.

"A pleasure to meet you, Danaë,"  At last, Arawn bows to Danaë.  As darkness bows to light.  A knight, who takes knee before a queen – to press his lips to the back of her silken hand with a kiss.  But there is nothing tame about his descent;  as though the earth were his lover, he greets on a bed of soot and ash.  There is nothing tame about the way the shadows curl upon his spine; climbing the toned muscles along his back, as though each bead of sweat clinging to his skin echoed for the threat of Armageddon.  There is nothing tame about his rugged masculinity – his unbridled rage – that tore like a dragon, into the open-wounds of smoke and twilight.  There is nothing soft about Arawn, as his horn dips beneath hers like a sword pressed into her armour. Grazing the soft, vermillion petals of her rose; brushing its flesh, just lightly enough to leave the softest of bruise, as he taps their root and soil with the severing tip of his horn. When his skull dips into his swarthy chest, Arawn becomes an image of elegance, of gentlemanly charm.   If only, for a brief moment. 

When he rises, he is not looking at her, but looking above her shoulder.  To the emptiness of evening, the desolate stretch dividing forest and urban domestication.  He gestures towards the snuffed-out candlelights, to the creeping fog rolling in like tide, as darkness sets deeper into the folds of midnight.  "Will you leave to join them, Danaë?" He asks, smiling with all the conviction of a devil.  Him and his hounds step away, his footfalls heavy like thunder upon the earth, allowing the moonlight to pass through; to drown her slender figure in blinding silver, even as the fog rolls in wicked and heavy.

@Danaë

Am i still rebuilding bone by fragile bone

[Danaë]

and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.


“If I am the moon in every form,” she laughs with the sound of a songbird’s wings mocking the winter wind as they linger in the fall (and she cannot recall ever discovering the taste of a laugh on her tongue before now). “Is it to the hollow, scythe curl of me that you bow? Or do you bow to the full of me when I am bright enough to blind?” The rose taps a warning against her knee, where it guards her bones like one of his hounds when he taps his horns against the petals and the roots. Danaë however is a god of that frail rose and she does not listen as a god never listens to a prayer until it is anointed with blood.

The sound of his voice, the guttural cruelty in it, does not quell her curiosity but rouses it. And when he smiles she does not see a violence, or a danger, to be fearful of. All she can see, when the fog thickens into a universe around them, is a thing to cause fear in. Somewhere she is lifting her head to bay at the moon in the twilight with him, somewhere she is hunting him instead of watching him bow like a knight over a tomb instead of a princess.

But here, with her guardian rose, she is a moon with darkness curling around her in the false hope that darkness will prevail. It will not. It will not. It will not.

Behind her she can almost feel the quickening and the death of the lanterns. The darkness that follows does not feel like a weight but like a comfort, a thing by which she might claim her right as she had claimed the heads from the tulips so that something beautiful might grow from the ordinary. And like those roses, and orchids, and ferns clawing out of the corpses of tulips she is not a flower waiting to be seen but one demanding of it.

When he pulls away she follows him, and his hounds, not like a unicorn tamed but like one starved for the ichor offered by the grasses at his hooves. If his footfalls are thunder, a rolling roar that could deafen the tide, her own are the silence that follows it. She is the feeling in the bones that something is coming, something terrible, on wake of that ache in the air.

Danaë is not the storm Isolt is: the hurricane and the devouring lightning. She is the wake, the aftermath, the devastation underneath which the frailest of hopes blooms.

And her hope, her frailest of hopes, is blooming with the orchids, and roses, and ferns. It blooms when she presses her nose to his like a wolf pressing theirs to the chewed out belly of a spring hare. She exhales her air right into his lungs and she does not ask to be let in. “You told me I was the moon,” she whispers in those same laughing poems of songbird wings, “and so it will not be the dead candles that I chase.”

The next step she takes, the next aftermath of a storm, comes quicker on the heels of his thunder than the last had. Hope grows a root.




@Arawn

[Arawn]

underworld


do i still taste of war.  can you feel the battles on my skin stitched across my back 

In another lifetime, in another universe one beyond this one, he might have been a soldier with a rifle slung across his broad shoulders; a lieutenant enlisted for war—with only the memory of a wife's kiss to accompany him like a ghost-caress in the blood-soaked trenches, the ravaged battlefields.  In yet another lifetime, he would have been a king of pagan times—a ruler of men, swathed in blood and dark nobility. In other lives, he could have been a gladiator —a slave— with only the scars upon his bronzed flesh as memories made through passion, through violence—sacrifice.

Each death, each memory, each reminder of who he once was, were etched unto his decayed spirit like patterns on a dead, fallen constellation.  But everytime he breathed, everytime he lived, it only ended in fire.  He ended in ruination—in death.  The dead memories of him, linger like lover's ghosts within the tomb of his ribs.  Their voices plague his mind; driving him into absolute insanity—ruin.  The memories he'd devoured, the lives he'd taken, they all haunt him like the festering sores upon rotted wounds full of stagnant pus.  He feels the primordial creature within his broken spirit, now —the otherworldly beast devouring its new host from within— gnashing its fangs against his bared teeth; climbing his throat with all the promise of disease.

He feels demons, demons itching beneath his skin—

He can sense it wrapping its jaws around the night of his heart, ushering a roar of thunder; a howl of savagery—sharp with the wretched scent of death.  The rancid taste of darkness follows his soul.  The fevered music of decay bleeds into Arawn's tainted heart like moonlight bleeding quicksilver against a bruised nightsky.  He can feel himself shattering, even now.  Breaking, like a mirror breaks, containing starved spirits trapped in a hollow vessel. Demons are peering out of his handsome skull; salivating infernal reflections, blinking within each of his cold, steel-grey eyes.  How his heart hungers for the hunt.  It salivates.  It wants.  It yearns to consume—

It wants life.

Arawn's hunger is an ancient thing not borne of this universe. A legendary curse.  He can feel their carnal whispers calling to him now, beckoning him with siren moans of old-world fable.

The forest bemoans his name, whispering promises he cannot taste as they draw shadows along his mouth with stolen kisses of wicked passion, driving him mad with desire.  The soil mars his skin; his bronzed muscles, tainted blood-red.  The bones of the animals he'd killed matt his hair, tangling like a woman's slender fingertips through his mane as they dangle like solemn graves rattling within the nocturnal breeze.  Arawn is an arrogant man, a wild man, and when his hellish gaze turns towards her in the moon-touched floodlights—is it not her rosy, crimson gaze he holds; but the raw, naked wilderness surrounding them.

That is, until—he feels her—motioning against his muscular side.  Seizing him with her celestial perfume, as she presses her maw next to his—breathing in, exhaling straight into his lungs.  She is ambrosial, a saccharine jezebel.  She is pure.  Full of promise, of danger, life. He breathes her in as he breathes in her tempest of savage, blooming wild-flowers.  She is pure intoxication as he inhales all of her in.  Her every seraphic curve.  Her every holy ruin.  He drinks her down, drunk, on the scent of an angel—

"Who said I would bow twice?" His whisper is the Lucifer. A smirk threatens to curl his lips.  The fog begins to salivate with miasmic dew; coiling mists, thick as serpents flow raggedly between them.  Darkness follows them in convulsions, it bellows in the wake of his vicious undertow, as the fog thickens against his muscled thighs. She follows him, but not as a maiden trapped in moonlight curves and tender desire.  She arrives like a reckoning—a bright archangel—in the wake of his thunder—she, the Persephone to his rugged, hunting hounds.  Blazing in her soft, righteous fury: radiant, intoxicating, commanding as she is beautiful.  Weaving hope with her ethereal voice, her precious flowers.

He can feel her slender figure bristling softly against his hard frame. He can feel the heat of her body brushing like silk above his muscles.  When twilight's shroud envelopes them both, it hung as saliva between his jagged smile—his dark lips. The moonlight becomes strings of silver.  Ardent, bewitching silver that pools like bedroom curtains between them; flapping sheets of gauzy azure.  Passing in and out, between and around, till the fog fell upon them like a cloak—or a noose—nestled heavy against their shoulders.

A zephyr stirs, and suddenly, it feels so cold. So chilling.  The ghastly breeze comes sighing in the wake of his thunder.  Arawn's hunting hounds wag their tails.  Their heavy jowls, bright with saliva.

"I will make an exception this once,"  Arawn does not smile, nor does he rejoice in her soft, musical laughter; but in a gesture almost tender, Arawn pulls a white rose from her army of flowers and tucks it behind Danaë's ear with a devilish grin. 

He wants to say, 'this rose suits you, too'.  To drop a whisper of a kiss upon her brow; to draw her body against the strength of his chest, with smooth, male fingers curled against her waist; to take her breath away, as she had taken his—but he only stands against the thick beams of moonlight.  Roguish, male, tall—indifferent.  Watching the way the moon dips into the ivory dimples of her soft, blood-touched curves.  Her flowing white hair descending her svelte physique, in strands so tameless and wild.  She could have stolen every angels' beauty and called it her hell.

"And what does m'lady wish to hunt—to chase?"  His voice is deliciously low, almost taunting. His breath falls in rigid plumes of smoke when he speaks.  He holds her gaze with his smouldering, criminal features.  His piercing grey eyes ensnares her likeness, her beauty, like winter ensnares the world. Let her see there is no tenderness within him.  Let her see the veil, the illusion of charm.  Already, he hears the forest calling his name.  Already he feels the forest reaching out for him, begging to hold him close, aching to tear him apart like a vengeful lover.  Aching to kiss his dark skin—like the pale, sensuous moonlight kisses hers.

@Danaë

Am i still rebuilding bone by fragile bone

[Danaë]

and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.


Beneath her hooves, beneath their shadows tangling, she can feel the ebb and flow of a dead-city beneath the soil sea of the meadow. Each tide echoes in her heart like a roar and a shift between sparrow to bramblebear. Moles scratch at the horizon beneath her hooves. Hawks sink their wings through the roots and the mud of last night’s rain as if she’s a cloud through which they might taste freedom again, and again, and forevermore.

And when he exhales back into her she falls deeper, and deeper, and deeper down into the soil-sea city of the dead.

Later she might wonder, when she twists her horn with her sister’s and tells her about Arawn, what it was about his taste, his sound, his dangerous promise, that made her see roses sprouting from his eyes when she blinked. Later she might wonder at the way her heart trembled at the image superimposed on the backs of her eyelids of thorn and berry bushes woven down his spine. Later, when a risen mouse curls up to sleep in her name, she might wonder what about him made her dream of growing life out of the thunderous darkness of him.

But for now, as she presses closer to the edge of whatever hurricane he is promising her, she does not wonder at the beauty of a rose that might bloom from his retina. Danaê only wonders about, only hungers for the feel of his touch as he tucks a torn off rose into her hair. She only wonders at the wolfish snarl of her heart at both the cruelty of the gesture and the gentleness of it.

Can you see the cruelty in you, she wants to ask him, can you see the hate it must take to tear out one of my roses so carelessly?

If there is charm in the gesture she has lost it somewhere between the lament of the rose and the youthful stutter of her heart. “I imagine you will always make an exception for me.” When taps her horn against a bone-shard tangled into his mane it is to grow a tangle of tiny furled roses that sprout from the worn cracks of the bone.

And when she smiles it is to say, even death makes an exception for me. What is a stallion to death, at the very marrow and core of them?

Her teeth ache like the bone shards waiting to be filled with rose stems. They ache to clack, and snarl, and sink like feathers into the soil-sea death might make of his flesh eventually. They ache to sink into the hurricane and thunder of him (and there she might plant hope, after hope, after hope like seeds to be watered in blood).

But they ache a little less when she lays them against his neck, and whispers there with a nip as delicate and cruel as his gift of one her roses, “You.”





@Arawn

[Arawn]

sleep now in the fire
the cost of my desire

The weight of her perfume drowns him.  It devours his soul like smoke devours the lungs.  Arawn is ice-cold still, when her fevered roses bloom wildly against his mane—when he feels them catch like teeth against his skin, against the ivory bones woven into his hair.  In serpent fashion their two shadows collide down upon the earth; they coil together in sin entanglement.  

Like her roses, he feels her violent soul, rooting into his heart like a promise.  A vice.  It feels like sin, and promise, when their breaths cloy together in the dying, night breeze; their tousled manes floating upon the zephyr as a moaning howl swept from the East.  Within the moon-touched beams she paints an image of both threat and desire.  When he sees himself within the red storm-seas of her gaze, he can see the promise of her hell.  Within their pulsing ruby-light, his reflection is not ethereal but visceral.  To her, he almost wants to yeild in full submission, as she whispers the word 'imagine', as she utters 'you' upon a deathly tongue—he wants her beauty to own him.

But she makes him drunk on the moon-glory of her.  She makes his muscles ache with a different kind of heat—and the chill of his gaze ensnares her, as an arrow, dipped in ambrosia, ensnares goddess-flesh.  While their bodies dance close, he devours her in silence. He hunts the sleek curve of her pale, white skin.  He hunts for the ghost-melody of her heartbeat.  He wants her joys, her sorrows—her violence. He wants the unshed tears within her eyes.  He wants her teeth to leave bloodied imprints on his skin, and call them moans—or prayers. "Maybe in a dream, or a nightmare, you'd imagine—either way; come haunt me,"  The arrogance curls his voice, till it becomes a sharpened caress.  There is no trace of emotion within him, even as traces of laughter may silver his words.  His hunger is a wicked thing.  It whets the backs of his fangs with venom.  

There is the promise of war on his lips.  There is thunder sighing in his blood, a kindling—a whirring fever. His hunger becomes raw at the nearness of her.  His soul, bares its teeth like a devil seduces the whole world with lust and wealth.  His muscles turn to wildfire, for the way they ache to brush alongside hers. His blood, burns (and hungers) for the heat of her touch—for the wild poison of her lips as she lays into him with teeth.  With her kiss sharp enough, poisonous enough, to be called a bite.  He nearly laughs then when she leaves upon him her delicate kiss.  He nearly presses his own mouth to her cheek—let his secrets, let his demons, slip against her flesh with a rough growl. But Arawn is a man of control.  Her words do not make him smile.  His lips brush down the tip of her ear, instead, that same shadow-laughter echoing within their male tenor. "Maybe, when you grow tired of your hunt, your violence, I could teach you other things besides chasing me—"

When he feels darkness pulling at his flesh, his fangs graze down upon his bottom lip.  Hunger draws his soul like salt an open wound.  There is snickering laughter hidden within him—somewhere in his darkened stare—a wolf bares its hackles and laughs with sharp, yellowed teeth. Still, he does not move.  Still, he does not yield.  His skull lowers next to hers, and when he finally allows himself to truly touch her, it is a dark kiss placed intimiately between her slim, porcelain shoulders.  "If you stay, Danaë," He murmurs roughly into her hair. "We would consume eachother,"  And when he angles his horn back towards the city, it is both offering and reprieve, to the holy light, to the divinity of her. 

@Danaë

do i still taste of war.  can you feel the battles on my skin stitched across my back. am i still rebuilding bone by fragile bone

[Danaë]

and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.


Tomorrow the dawn will bring rain-fat clouds across the horizon. It will turn those water-clouds golden, and rose-kissed, and each flower in her corpse garden will glimmer with gilded dew instead of frost. Each time she closes her eyes, and her heart races sparrow in a storm fast, she can see every kaleidoscope of color.

Tomorrow, she already knows, will remind her of him.

But tonight the fog is only rolling in thicker, and thicker, until it’s a cage keeping the rest of the world from them. Tonight the gloom does not carry a warning of rain but a promise of it as sea-salted and root-food as a summer storm. She can taste it on his hair, salt enough to make her think of sorrow. The flavor of it echoes a dream she had one night and it feels as if she’s racing down the cliffs to the sea when his lips only promise touch at the shell of her ear.

This must be hunger, she thinks, true hunger.

To her it does not seem so very deep, or so very dangerous, when she leans into his touch like a wolf to a collar (all for the promise of a bowl of food and the hand of it after). She can already taste him on the very cusp of her echoing throat in which not a single hawk, or stag, or songbird is stirring yet. The dark chasm of her soul brightens with hope, and want, and that feel of true hunger rising like a tide. She wonders if the ocean will pour out when she opens her mouth again.

“You are arrogant, Arawn.” The words come even as she bows beneath the feel of his touch between her shoulder blade. Hair rises like seedlings down her spine as the electric pulses from his heat settle into her skin like a stormfront. “But do not,” the first sparrow since he found her echoes in her throat, “let arrogance make you blind.” And the sparrow settles to song and the hawk falls into a nosedive as he plummets through her heart when she lifts her tail blade to rest below his eye.

Danaë is disappointed that she had to remind a hunter how foolish it is to think of consuming before teeth are laid at a throat. But she tries to forgive him for not being raised in the bosom of the forest with a sister who has a hunger deeper than a blackhole.

Her tongue does not need the flavor of his blood to know the feel of it. But tomorrow, in the rain, will be soon enough to learn the flavor of him.

He should have known better, already,  than to point her towards civilization like the realm of walls, and fireplaces, and church-bells are the salvation of a unicorn. There is nothing holy for her in the cities of mortals, or in the gazes of men who look so deeply but see nothing. So when she leaves him with his hounds alone for company she lets her blade cleave miles of wounds in the earth by which he might find her again, and again, and again.

And she wonders, as the dark wild consumes her, if he’ll be blind enough, or man enough, to consider him the hunter and her the prey as he follows her trail of bloody and flowered earth.



@Arawn

[Arawn]

sleep now in the fire
the cost of my desire

He imagines their souls, their hearts,  dissolving into one another in a language only they might know.  Tangling like roots through the dead earth made of lovers' corpses.  It is with an intimate hush, and ardent prayer, that his lips tangle through her pale, bone-white hair as he breathes in her holiness, her candor.  His ardor for her deepens, when she lifts her tailblade to his face, and begs him come closer so that she may spill his blood unto the earth—he wants her war, her music, her Armageddon, to send him crashing into her Hell where an earthly tomb awaits his arrival—

O, but he'd pull her under, too, with his smouldering passion, with a hunger so raw it could take her breath away.  There is hunger and ache and violence within him, as chaos and madness, writhes their slick, serpent forms in the core of his lean stomach.  Her nearness draws a hiss along his lips.  When he murmurs into her hair, and when she curls into him, he can only drown further into her softness, her beauty, her own echoing breath of hunger. It is husky and sensual, when he speaks, and his words rumble like thunder in his throat, before they caress hot against her skin.  "That has never stopped me before," Is all he says, as she leaves, and takes the moonlight with her, so that the night may ache and follow after her with a wretched abandon.

But when she leaves, when her slender figure is swallowed up by the thickening fog-spell, he watches her cut up the earth in the wake of her graceful departure, as though she leaves a string of web to follow—

And it is within the secret place between spoken prayer and hidden command—between the holy light of her goddess-skin and the saccharine purity of her darknened innocence, that taints him and carves his heart with a hideous longing.  The memory of her skin on his lips leaves an aftertaste—it is an echo for the wanting of more, more.  As the silken scent of her hair, her lips, her neck, and the whirring of her tail, tangles like violent roses and wild poetry into his heart.  Arawn will remember her as intimately as he remembers the earth beneath his flesh, as the fires that kissed and ravaged his skin.  And even as the darkness gives, swallowing him whole, she still takes pieces of him—her light leaves with her, and her flowers fade into the foggy deluge, like a ghost-ship writhing along haunting, black seas.

Left alone now, the same roaring rumble bellows like a wolf crawling hungrily from his throat.  It aches to tear free. To follow her.  To hunt her.  To chase her and run her down into the earth, where they may tangle in not blood, but heat and nearness and a hundred other things only the earth may know.  Arawn rears, tossing his skull upward, flaying the dirt beneath his hooves, as he commands his hounds with a rough, echoing snarl.  When she takes her tenderness with her, he is only left with his violence—and his violence, makes him a wild man unhinged. The heathen, the red stallion, gallops away into the night, with only his ragged growl upon his jaws, and the memory of her lips lingering like scripture carved into his skin.

@Danaë

do i still taste of war.  can you feel the battles on my skin stitched across my back. am i still rebuilding bone by fragile bone