There is a river running through the heart of the city in currents of silver and gold. Horses pause in their explorations and conquerings to slake their belly-of-the-island thirst. They drink, and drink, and drink, until their lips are dripping silver instead of mortal language. They smile and all their teeth turn to stars caught in the black cosmic gravity of their lips.
Danaë knows the river is not water. No water is so silver, so metallic, so shining in the blinking eyes and the sun. Only blood can be the color of light. Only the blood of dead stars is so bright.
Or maybe the blood of gods.
And she is thirsty, so thirsty that her throat feels like the desert her father has told her stories of. She is as parched as her mother for it, as starved as Eligos in the middle of winter, as ravenous as her sister. Her mouth waters like a fox as she watches the mortals smile their star-blood smiles and laugh until star-blood spit is falling from their lips like sorrow.
She wants to join them, to spit her sorrow and her stardust and laugh as she drinks down death.
Instead she pauses at the crying shop with walls that weep that same silver-blood and tremble in a cacophony of agony that her horn sings right back in lines of wood slivers running in lines straighter than the horizon. She digs, and digs, and digs, with both her blades until the floor is flooded up to her ankles with silver-blood that anyone else but her might call tears, or water, or rain in the belly of the island.
Danaë knows better.
Somewhere she can hear the snarl of Eligos and the screech of the beginning of her mother's war. Somewhere her sister is carving out her own agony, her own war, her own thirst in the city. Somewhere horses are laughing with their mouths full of blood.
And Danaë, who still knows better, keeps trying to carve out the sorrow of the sobbing and weeping shop. Even when the sorrow rises up to her knees---
She does not stop.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
Ipomoea is following that silver-blood river as it flows up, up, up into the heart of the city. He lets it lead him past the other horses filling their bellies with it, and he does not stop to tell them that it will do nothing for their thirst, or their hunger, or their hearts. He can feel the truth of it resting like a stone at the bottom of him, while his lungs tremble and his steps echo on the bone-bright floors. And still he walks on, and the further he goes into the the labyrinth of the city stretched out like a carcass before him, the more he begins to wonder.
He wonders how the river is not raging. How it flows so gently past the weeping walls and the screaming ones, and does not stop but for death.
And he wonders how the horses can stand there, smiling and drinking, and never stop to wonder what it is they are drinking from, or why it runs so thick, and hot, and lurid like a vein.
Maybe that is all it is.
There is a moment where he wonders if he cuts the artery in enough places, if it would be enough for the island to bleed out. If the island would collapse like a mortal, bones and muscles and organs trembling for want of blood. Nothing that lives, lives forever — and the island, he knows, is living. The truth of it is there in the silver water that fills them up and only waters the root of their craving to grow from sprout to flower.
It’s there in the weeping walls, that spill out their blood like tears if only to hide the screaming of the walls beneath them.
But he is not a unicorn with blades made to tear out the island’s veins. And so he only follows it, all the way up, and up, and up to the weeping wall where it begins. And there is where he finds his daughter, carving out the sobbing and the screaming like its sorrow is her own.
The island’s blood is warm when he steps into its river at last, and reaches for her. “Danaë." Her name is a whisper beneath the weeping of the wall, but still he steps deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the sorrow until he can touch her cheek as gently as a butterfly against a flower.
He does not ask her what she is doing (he already knows — the same way he knows that if he had a horn, he would bury it into the wall beside her’s.) Instead he only sighs, and listens to the island crying out all around them. There is a story to be found in its sorrow, and in its rage — if only they learned its language.
“Why do you think the walls are so sad?” he asks her. And again he starts to wonder —
The sorrow has become an ocean of moon-silver tides curling around her knees and ebbing against the hollow cliff of her chest. Each drop of it feels to her like an intimate whisper of wanting, of need, of save me, save me, save me. And she, like a silver-dollar caught in the moon-silver tide, sometimes cannot tell the roundness of her from the roundness of the sorrowful sand of the store shore.
When her father comes, pressing understanding that she did not ask for into her cheek (and though she did not ask for it she clings to the noose of it like a new widow), she is more tide than silver-dollar. She is more silver-blood than unicorn and her teeth ache with the sorrow that her magic does not want her to swallow down into her belly. It makes her sick, that sorrow stone, when it sits at the bottom of her belly with magic crashing against it.
She does not pull her horn from the flesh and marrow of the store when she looks at her father. The look makes of her a wild thing, all coated in blood with bloody eyes fringed in white. “Father.” Her voice echoes like the wailing store, a tome of blood and sorrow whittled down like a blade from a rotten branch of spruce. It feels like a current of that river has made a riverbed from the flat backs of her teeth.
It feels like devouring. If she had ever doubted her sister’s craving from it she knows that she never will again. And perhaps that is the only peace she will find in the silver-moon-sea of blood.
“The walls do not want this life.” With the answer she drives her horn into the wood again, and again, and again, until her face shines as brightly as the sorrow sea lapping at her hocks. At her hip her blade waits snake-still and for a moment it understands far more (far, far more) than Danaë does. When her heart stumbles it taps against her hip like a warning she’s desperate to heed.
Her body knows that her soul, that fragile sparrow in a monster’s mouth, was made from all the terrible parts of this island. It knows it even when feeling her father’s touch makes her hunger to forget. And her horn is still digging into the wood when she begs of her father, in a way she has never begged before--
“Save them.”
Save them all.
Save her. Save her. Save her.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
If there was a way to carve the sorrow out from Danaë’s soul he would no sooner peel back his ribs and print the language of it into his own bones.
And he is thinking of that golden sapling again, growing and dying and weeping in his mind. It’s always there, always stretching out one branch to brush against him whenever he is least expecting it, whenever he forgets. Always, it is reaching.
Always, he is aching.
There are too many pieces of himself scattered through the sand and the soil, too many pieces that have died and unfurled and withered as they grew through stones. And left behind were the scars where saplings once grew like wildflowers creeping through the cracks of the sidewalk. But now they are bare and bruised like winter. Watching Danaë carve the sorrow from the weeping walls — her own sorrow, he knows it is her own even when he does not want to admit it — is like forcing roots to grow between the fissures like stitches holding a wound closed.
And even with the echo of the wall’s sorrow ringing out in his bones, shaking awake the fury found there that has never learned to stop chanting enough, enough, enough — still he steps forward. Still he touches his shoulder to her’s, his cheek to her’s, his soul to her’s, turning her from it all. “We can’t always choose our lives.”
He does not tell her he cannot save them.
He knows it would be too much like telling her he could not save her.
When did it become so easy to overlook the truth of it? It is almost too hard for him to turn now from sharp to soft, broken to whole, lost to found — it is almost too hard to save himself, and still he looks at Danaë and every bit of his soul is whispering I can save you to her’s.
“But we can choose what we do with what we have. Everything will rust eventually, but that doesn’t mean steel is any the less bright when it is first forged.” The first flower that blooms in the weeping walls doesn’t care that it’s star-blood instead of water drowning its roots.
It only unfurls its petals and smiles in the only way that nature knows how: with colors, and vibrancy, and life, and the silk-soft petals that fan themselves around a unicorn’s horn. Hawthorn and water poppies and hyacinth all press themselves like kisses against her cheek when she makes the next cut. Lily pads and lotus flowers tangle like fishing nets around her legs, shoots tugging on her hocks like a whisper begging her to come away (in all the words Ipomoea does not know how to speak himself.)
They press themselves to her with promises of pollen, and life, and laughter instead of weeping, laughter enough to almost (almost) drown out the crying walls (but still it goes on beneath like disease in the lungs, like a hiccup, like death following on its white horse.) And Ipomoea has seen enough of death to know it will never not be chasing after life, lying in wait.
His bones are still chanting like it is a war he’s turning his eyes towards and not his daughter. But where being brave once seemed impossible, now when he looks into eyes that are as bloody as his own it seems like the only thing left to be.
Her heart, that sparrow in a monster’s mouth heart, trembles down into heartbreak from sorrow. It laments in cracks, and quivers, and seedlings rupturing through her aorta. Here it has forgotten the song of joy, of the wind billowing through her horn, of the saplings bowing meak and mortal as she hunts with her sister, of the euphoria of a mouse as it drags a daisy down its hollow reed throat. Here it has forgotten how to feel anything but tragicness, but regret, but an agony so deep and endless that Danaë, as she trembles, feels not like a girl, or a unicorn.
Danaë feels like all the stars in a constellation as a blackhole opens up between them and promises eradication.
She is not Isolt designed to survive the brimstone and monster world. She is not Isolt to drag her teeth down sorrow and swallow it like wine and nightshade leaves. She is not her mother to hunt, and rend, and ruin, and consume, until all the agony is a tine on the crown upon her brow. And she is not her father who can press their bloody cheeks together and grow a garden full of a million hopes, and smiling flowers, and vines that pull her away from sorrow instead of into it.
She doesn't know what she is outside a unicorn with death wrapped around her sparrow in a cage heart that begs for life, and sky, and freedom.
But when her father presses his cheek to hers, and grows a garden around her, she wants to be full of his beauty with a desperation that aches far deeper than hunger. If there is any choice that she can make it would be the understanding of flowers that smile instead of consume, and whisper instead of howl. And so she lets the flowers lead her away as a desperate things lets a noose wrap around their neck just to lift them out from the open-belly of a cliff face.
If this is how he must save her, how he must save anything sorrowful with a garden, she can find it in herself to understand.
A dahlia and a daffodil rise from the blood and the star-and-monster-flesh wood. A weed vine coils around her father’s vine, and a sapling sprouts downward from the bone-roof as if they are two suns instead of two things straining for life like hounds at a fox den.
“Then if it all must rust, or die, I will make it bright again.” And because she cannot, does not know how, to be anything but life chasing after death chasing after life, a sunflower rises from the meat of the wailing store like each drop of blood is fertilizer instead of sorrow.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
In the star-blood river Ipomoea can no longer tell where his magic ends and his daughter’s begins. His water-poppies mix with her dahlias, her vines of ivy tangle around the stems of his lilies, and the tree sprouting down instead of up turns as bright and golden as saplings in a sunlit-forest (but there is no sun here.)
To him, Danaë is already as full of the beauty of this garden they grow as he is. It does not matter that her flowers grow from the bones of this island and the blood of its monster-heart; they are all the stronger for it. Ipomoea has spent his life running from the death of things and pretending the life he grows in other places can make up for it all, but his daughter — she does not need to run from it when she can transform it in a way he never could.
It is the only thing he knows. It is the only means of salvation he has ever been able to offer.
And there is that part of him that knows it is not enough; that she is as much Thana’s daughter as his. But still he sighs when she follows him from the wall, and when flowers that drip silver tears wrap themselves around her horn. Still he swallows down her sorrow like it is his own (and maybe it is his own that he has only forgotten the sound of) and demands his flowers to grow from the waste of it.
So they grow. They grow from sorrow and pain and anger, and when he lifts his cheek from Danaë’s he thinks it makes them all the brighter for it.
His eyes are softer than they have been in weeks, in the way sorrow is always soft. If there is a crack filling with seedlings in the sorrow of Danaë’s soul, he can almost see it in the sunflower sprouting from the wall. The sight of it almost breaks him, almost lets that part of him that is sand and all the hardness of the desert loose on this castle. He wants to destroy the weeping wall and the screaming one and everything in this world that has seeded sorrow into her soul.
Again, he swallows it down.
"Even in death a tree in our forest still gives life. It enriches and refreshes the earth. From a single nurse log dozens of new things might root for the first time.” He does not tell her that that is what she is — Danaë is more than a nurse log in a forest. “Most people give up on things they think to be dead. It is a brave thing to grow life where others run.” He smiles like he is becoming a soft god instead of a feral one, like he is still that boy whose only ambition was growing a garden.
Maybe he still is, somewhere beneath the learned violence and the songs of war in every heartbeat. Maybe he is re-becoming it when he looks at his daughter.
He hopes it is. He would reform himself again and again if only to know his daughters could do the same. So when he looks up at the two upside-down tree and asks her, “who is it you want to be, Danaë?” it is as much for his own hope as her’s.
On her cheeks each of her tears turn to fire, and water, and the weeping remains of thunder. Sorrow as it turns to an undertow in her heart, a pull that drags each seedling rupturing her aorta down into her heart, takes each ounce of her father’s wisdom and changes it like a chrysalis. In her chest every sparrow in the monster’s mouth breaks loose and shakes spit and froth from their wings. Her magic roars, and roars, as she discovers that bravery feels nothing like a nurse log in her chest.
The sparrows sing and their song is only one of a hope so bitter, and sweet, that she cannot name the flavor when she licks the drops of silver-blood from her lips where it fell from her horn. It blossoms faster, and brighter, than all the flowers they can grow together.
Discovering how easily her father holds up the weight of her, of all this sorrow and hope and bravery, seems like a revelation. Isolt had seemed the only one who understood, who could hold all her softness when it became heavier than any steel sword forged out of a star-belly. It feels lighter when her father holds it, like his magic is the root upon which the pale and fragile flowers of her own have bloomed.
And suddenly the world of weeping houses does not seem so terrible.
Perhaps, to a unicorn who grows only in death, this is a world made to fill every hunger she had not known she was starving from.
“I do not feel brave.” She says because she doesn’t. Her blood is racing with more than bravery when it is billowed up with a storm of hope. But it is not thunder echoing in her veins like it echoes in mother and Isolt, it is the sound of a storm watering a universe of gardens. It is pouring as she leans more and more of her weight against her father. The upside down sapling flutters in the breeze of her magic as it races to keep up with her father’s.
Her horn brushes the shell of his ear, a unicorn’s kiss, when she closes her eyes to feel every inch of corpse, and wood, and monster jaw, begging for the same touch. “I want to be Danaë.” In the darkness of her closed eyes she can see the shape of her, the wicked tip of her horn between the soft tangles of mane. And for the first time she is content with that.
“I want to be what comes after life and after death.” If she had not been a unicorn she might have called that heaven, or utopia. But instead when she opens her eyes to see how the blood has risen to their bellies it seems too profane a thing to be holy or religious.
She does not try to pull away as her magic starts to bottom out keeping up with her father’s. And even when she grows weary, and the eye-sun settles outside, she does not pull away. What comes after life and after death is not a creature that pulls away.
It is a creature that stays until every cosmos has turned to a garden brushing against her hocks.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
Ipomoea has wondered if his flowers have ever felt this brand of pain.
The pain of growing too much and too fast, of thorns breaking the skin of a wild flower that never before needed to learn how to be hard, or sharp. Of bluebells blooming in an unforgiving desert, and daturas struggling to grow in a land they know they do not belong in. Of saplings that are dying as quickly as they are regrowing, upside-down and reaching for two suns that will soon abandon them.
He wonders it this is how his trees feel, when he begs the orchid to grow atop their barks and steal their life force for its own.
And still he knows he would do it again, and again, and again if it could stop his pain — their pain — from becoming his daughter's. If he could stop the magic that made her taking and taking and consuming until there was nothing left to consume, if he could fill its endless hunger with his own flesh his own flowers, it would already be done. Danaë is looking at him like he is the root upon which a brighter world might grow and he does not have the heart to wonder what it might turn to when he cannot save this world.
He wants to tell her that softness never feels like bravery, not until after you have already cut the lines of it from your bones trying to be brave without it. But instead he leans his shoulder against her’s to catch her as she wilts, and says, “that is when we must learn to be.” And he hums the words even when he wants to scream them. Even when he wants to wilt beside her he makes himself grow taller, makes his flowers bloom brighter, makes his magic curl around her stuttering sapling until it reaches as far down as his, until his grows beside her’s like it would die without it (and maybe it would.)
His skin feels just as cold as the star-tears rising in waves against their bellies. It aches to sink below a sea of sorrow and lie there not like the root of hope growing through the world, but the bitter one. It wants to reach for the rage to fill the sadness like a storm, and each time there’s thunder he can feel it humming in his blood like he is the lightning striking the earth. But he is not ready to become that. Not yet, not yet, not when his daughter needs him, needs to learn to be brave, needs to learn there is as much softness in joy as there is in sorrow.
“Then I will help you learn to become it,” he whispers in the hollow above her eyes. And he lets that promise become a lullaby, as it carries them through the sea of sorrow like they are the only bit of sand and shore keeping it at bay. And even when the two saplings shudder and stop growing behind them, he lets the water-poppies and hyacinth and dahlia bob like ships against their legs, sailing to a new land with them.
