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.
@Ipomoea
