For a unicorn made from a king, it has always felt stranger than it should to walk between stone walls. Each echoing step feels like a gateway mouth instead of a step, through a garden instead of a staircase. Part of her wants to turn back, to return to the meadow where her sister is laying a circle of death instead of beauty. In her bones she can feel the call of it-- the whisper of the mice caught for so long in the walls, the songs of sparrows trapped in the eaves arching above her.
The call of it, of death, is the only note carrying her forward through the lit staircase and the bodies pressing close enough that she can feel their heartbeats through their skin. Like a shield she gathers it around her, a dark cloak, to keep all the brightness of the mortals out.
Sometimes she thinks she hates them for the chaos in their blood, the frail beauty in their gaze that is so bright against the lingering shadow of their coming fates. Sometimes she hates them only for their hope (and what she calls hate is hunger when she is too tired to deny the harshness of it).
By the time she makes it to the balcony her lungs are aching with the want of air fresh from the sea, tinged with the lingering tang of rotten weed and sulfur. Her heart flutters at the taste of it on her tongue (for the taste of anything but sweat and flowers). The fluttering is soon replaced by the drumbeat of something that is not quite hunger but close enough that she has no name for it when the twilight wind howls through her horn.
Below her the flowers draw the shapes of constellations she does not know. But in the patterns she can see a bramblebear woven with wisteria, a sparrow stitched together with ivy, and a fox with a tongue of dandelions. Those are the only stories she can hear, the only songs she knows how to sing, when the lights between the lines of flowers are lit.
When the flickering light stitches out pale lines between the shapes in the flowers, her heart leaps at the sight. And she knows, as she turns to the girl coming closer, that it is not hunger she feels.
It’s wanting with an ache deep enough to devour her whole.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
I watch her walk down the hall and I think to myself, is that what a princess is supposed to look like?
My mother has told me of her. Or rather, of her parents; one of them is the king Ipomoea.
And I know from her description—bone-white and blood-red; I heard their horns are swirled like ribbon—that this girl slipping through the halls of my family’s castle, coat like blood-stained ghost, must be one of the royals from Delumine.
I watch her walk down the hall and think to myself, is that what I’m supposed to look like? She’s just taller than me, and a little more slightly built. Within seconds of seeing her I find myself bitterly jealous of her finely built head; her unfairly nimble legs; the long, elegant sweep of her tail behind her, like a white flag in war. The stark white of her coat makes her seem almost gauzy against the half-lit hallway, edges blurred like a spirit under the pale orange lanterns.
She looks like the paintings of unicorns that hang on our walls. Like a sketch I saw once in a fairytale book. That is what a princess should look like, I think; not like me, who broke the first mirror I looked in.
My eyes follow her, and I feel my chest tighten with envy. Salt builds in my throat; I feel the rough crystals on my tongue, the taste of it somewhere between blood and tears and pure, acrid, envy.
The terrible feeling only clears when I finally move toward her. Each stride further dislodges the hard, acidic knot in my chest, and by the time I am halfway down the hallway, halfway to the balcony, it has been replaced by a feeling of anxiety so bright, so light, I almost feel as though I’ve been lifted off my feet. The fishhook of it pulls me up—I can’t feel my steps or hear my hooves against the ground. Instead, the only sound is the blood rushing in my ears, and then the thin, musical whistle of the wind when I finally step outside.
Below us the world is spread out like a tapestry. I see endless fields of tulips: bright yellow and red, a cool blue-almost-green, a checkerboard of pastels in pink and washed-out purple. Every flower—every petal, even—is painted over by the gold of the sun streaming down overhead, and it is enough, for just a moment, to draw my eyes away from the girl.
But then she turns to look at me, and her eyes are red as rubies, and I blurt out: “You’re a princess, too.”
She has only ever known flight through the thoughts of a sparrow caught in the loam. Through that sparrow she had tasted the winter-frost of the north wind and the desert-dryness of the south. She has felt the humidity of a forgotten island jungle weighing down her eyelashes. The weight of wings, even ones long turned to dust draped across flight-bones like satin, had made her shoulders ache with the need to run, and run, and run, until a cliff was at her belly and a sun gorged on the point of her horn.
And when the girl joins her, and the light shifts to a halo on feather instead of crown, she desperately wants to know what flavors might linger yet on her skin, her lips, and the places where feathers whisper instead of roar.
Isolt would bleed it from her.
But Danaë, only feels that sparrow in her chest stumble into wakefulness and catch a mouse in his beak as if he is owl instead of song. She only feels the way her shoulders ache less when she turns into the girl’s shadow like a wraith instead of away from it like a unicorn should. The flowers do not hold their appeal in the memory of winter-frost and desert-dryness. How could, she thinks, anything?
“I do not feel like one.” She whispers quietly enough that she can imagine her face buried in feathers instead of the golden sunlight billowing through the castle. “Or at least I do not know what it should feel like to be one.” Danaë steps closer so that she might sink deeper in the girl’s shadow, deep enough that she hopes to discover how she was supposed to feel before her bones quicked by hours instead of months.
It feels like something vital, some secret, had been stolen from her before she knew to miss it.
Below them a meadowlark starts to sing and the forest of songbirds in her chest leap like rabbits to the sound of home. She wonders if the girl can hear it, hear the way her heart does not sound like a pulse but like a forest in the middle of a summer day. A mouse caught in the wall flickers open his violet eyelids and for a moment all she can see is the black belly of the castle where all the things forgotten by the sunlight live.
She opens her eyes again and the brightness, where it dances in the girl’s eyes, is blinding. And when she brushes her hip to a wing and asks, “do you?”, it is the sound of that violet-eyed mouse praying for a little bit of a sunlight.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
