widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
M
other told her once, as she watched an eagle carry a trout from the river in his claws, the horses of this world will be so quick, so eager, to offer their hearts to you. That night Danaë had not understood the words. She could not comprehend being so careless with a heart as fragile as one born is, so eager to rip it out of their chests at the hope, that foolish mortal hope, that death is a thing to race towards. There is no glory in a ghost, no tenderness in a corpse, no love in a crumbled and dried out heart. There is nothing in death but heavy dirt and a bed of stones in which no dream ever comes.
In death there is nothing, nothing at all, until a unicorn comes.
And so she follows the girl as she walks not like a ghost but like the thing that creates it. Beneath her hooves, down in the dark below her shadow, a sparrow sings with a mouth full of roots. A fawn brushes its teeth against a stone like it’s a teat instead of a grave-marker. Squirrels titter in their nests of an eon worth of dead-leaves and fallen pines. An entire world, an entire forest, walks with the unicorns as they follow the girl who can only see the curse of them and not the potential.
Danaë does not answer the child, because she is a child in a why they are not, when she asks her first question. A reaper does not press a kiss to a pale brow caught in a fever and so neither does she as she steps closer and brings with her the tittering squirrels, the singing sparrow, and the sucking fawn. Snow gathers in the spiral of her horn, and fills in the gaunt crease of her spine and the pale planes of her cheeks. Her eyes glimmer in the brightness of the forest in the winter where even the gnarled trees cannot fully chase out the moon’s haunting gleam (and she tries not to think of the way her eyes shine like two holes filled up with blood and nothing else).
If there is a hush in the forest when all the ghosts make a sound she cannot hear it. All she can hear is the way their bodies strain towards the life in her blood like she is both sun and rain to their brittle roots. A hawk joins the sparrow with a scream instead of a song. An owl bays for the moon between his feathers like a wolf bays for blood. They are all she can hear outside the steady call of her sister’s magic to her own.
She steps closer, close enough to feel the weighted darkness of the child’s world more than the winter chill. The darkness swallows up the bloody gleam of her eyes like they are moons in her head instead of eyes. “A child fears the sunlight when they are torn from the womb, before they know any better.” She presses deeper in the darkness, where she can feel the grave buried in the dirt.
And there in the darkness she starts to hum, a mother’s song, to the children who still do not know better.
{ @Isolt @Elliana "speaks" notes: <3
