am too young to want to escape my body. But I do. Oh, I do.
It comes from the dreaming. It comes from the deja vu that strikes me unexpectedly in my waking days. When I visit the docks and hear the wet slush of a fishing net dropped to the deck, or the sound of sails catching wind.
It comes from not knowing where my father went, and from knowing too well what it sounds like for my mother to muffle her tears. I don’t speak of him, anymore. I’ve found it easier to pretend he never existed; that I was simply a child of Vespera and, well—
It is easier that way. That cool detachment.
(I can’t feign it at night, when I am alone; I can’t feign it when I am staring out my window toward the star-freckled sky).
But I can feign it now. I can feign it now as I slip out the back of the citadel to a narrow game trail. It is overgrown with ivy and other foliage. At this season, it bursts with greenery. I read about spring, in winter, as a boy. But I had never understood it until now, on the edge of summer. The birds are singing and the sea is warm enough to swim in; but I am not leaving the citadel to swim.
I skip down the narrow trail and then, when the rocks crumble from beneath my feet, I take flight.
I am too young to want to escape my body. But I do. Oh, I do.
One day, it might drive me to drink or to gamble or to fight. One day I might drive me to women or to dares or to unclimbable ventures. But today, today—it only makes me kiss the sky.
I bank off the cliff, fighting the coastal breeze; I skim over the top of waves and then ascend, up, up, until the ocean bleeds back into land. The earth beneath me seems as brutal as the feelings in my chest; the breaks are just as jagged, just as severe. I go from the sea to the cliffs to the fields where the tulips open beneath me in a blush of color.
I land there, I think, because it is beautiful. In my mind I plan to pick tulips for Elli—and then think better of it, worrying that, perhaps, she might be saddened by their lives cut short. I feel lost as soon as my hooves hit the earth. Around me there are couples and pairs and I am alone. I wander off to the edge, where the tulips bleed back into grass, and that is where I see her.
“Danaë,” I greet and already I am not myself. Already, I am Terrastella’s prince, and my voice is warm. “Are you alone?”
She is older than before; she looks older than me. But I am not like some. I understand the magic of these lands, and the magic of growing. I know, without asking, that we are both winter born and will be until we die. "It seems odd you're here. Can't you grow all the flowers you want?" I ask it a little wryly, with a curling to the edge of my mouth.
the boy who looks all soft and angel doesn't make it out alive
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
E
ach golden dust of pollen catching in the sunlight spearing through the clouds makes Danaë feel like a unicorn materializing. When the pollen gathers on her nose she feels like both the hive and the flower hungry to devour up tilled earth. The mist rolling in from the distant sea makes her feel like a root watered and unfurling deep into the belly of the earth. Sunlight, when it gatherers like golden and silver fire in her horn, turns her into something more corporeal than a ghost.
She feels alive, and wanting, and more than a shard of the dead waiting to be put back together and swallowed up by life. And it feels dangerous, so very dangerous, to be a furiously alive unicorn instead of one with a black and rotten noose around her horn.
Life is still coursing violently, cruelly, through this materialized version of her when he finds her again. The sound of his voice sparks a memory, a reminder, and a soft warning tap of hunger against the insides of her ribs. But she is not the same unicorn who saw beauty in the eyes of gone-to-war marble horses today.
Today she is in the sunlight. Her horn is a telescope of brightness and all she can see is light, light, light across the rotten tulips that mark where her sister has wandered once more out of reach. And maybe, just maybe, she feels a little like Isolt who wants the whole world when she turns her pollen dusted hive and bloom nose towards him.
She does not tell him that she is never alone. Only boys, things not yet materialized ask such things of her. Are you alone? Are you art? Are you lost, lost, lost? All their words are nothing more than more particles of mist rolling in from the sea to water the flowers (forgotten but for the way a bloom uses them to make beauty).
The black rot whispers at her hooves like Isolt might and tries to hurry her along. But she is too full of life not to linger here, with him and a voice too princely for her to care for it. “I can only grow flowers from the death of yours.” Her voice is an echo of that desert in the night voice, the one he had used with her that night, and a hint of her own whisper of birch on birch in the wind.
When she cleaves off the heads of the last of his tulips this far from the planted rows of them, and digs up the new-grass so only the charred winter grass remains, her mouth curls in an echo of his when a garden starts to grow.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
eneas wishes he understood how she is both sharp and soft at the same time. He has always felt as if he is a contradiction, but does not look it. But she wears pollen as if she herself is a flower; and still, the point of her horn gleams with a curious threat. I can only grow flowers from the death of yours, she says, and Aeneas finds it at once dark and enchanting. “I picked them,” he says. “They’re already dead.”
The words sound so matter-of-fact they do not belong in Aeneas’ mouth. Aeneas, the dreamer. Aeneas, the boy of stars and sun. Aeneas, the twilight prince. What right does the word dead have to exist from his lips? He is not surprised when, deftly and without effort, she beheads the flowers he offers. As they fall with dull—nearly silent—thuds, he watches in amazement as a new garden begins to grow. He knows it is not a secret; but for a moment, as he watches with wonder, it feels like one.
“Does it make you sad?” Aeneas asks, suddenly. “Does it make you sad, your magic kills to live?”
Lost girl, lost girl. Does it hurt to kill?
Aeneas does not succeed in hiding the slight desperation in his voice. He wants to know because at night when he goes to the window and stares at the stars, he can feel the heartbeat of the universe and how each star has the potential to become a great void, too heavy for light, too heavy for life. He looks at her too intensely, too curiously.
He wants to hear talk of magic that does not come from a priest’s mouth.
the boy who looks all soft and angel doesn't make it out alive
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
B
etween the earth and the creatures of the earth (those made from it) there is an intimacy that no cloud, no star, no rainbow that fades to nothing across the horizon, can understand. It lives between the root and flower, the dirt and the hoof inch deep in it. In each breath of the earth when the wind howls through the too-tall pines there is a new deepness that forms in that intimacy.
Danaë, as she watches his feathers shine like diamonds in the sunlight, knows that Aenas’s blood (deeper than the cells) is too light-as-air to understand the weight of every stone, every mountain, every root-system more alive than all their mortal cities. And when she smiles her secret smile as she shapes the one he had worn into something too heavy to fly on her lips, knows that he can’t hold that either.
Her eyes sting when she looks at the corpses of the flowers. “They were not dead when you picked them. Your flowers were in agony but not dead, not until me.” Nothing in her body strains towards him. Instead she steps deeper into the roses, and bone-white tulips, and daffodils blooming from the winter grass that had ached below the spring grass. Each petal whispers against her legs with stories of the meadowlark and the red fox waiting just below their shadows. There is not a single flower that whispers to her of boys with stardust in their eyes and blackholes in their chests.
The earth is not concerned with those sorts of birds.
A forest does not live in him and so when she lifts her head from the beauty of the blooming dead-grass, she does not expect him to understand when she says, “Tell me which of us is the killer and which of us is mercy.” And it is a mercy when she tilts her horn to the sun instead of to that fragile bottom of his eye.
A black rose grows higher than the others as it reaches for all the cosmic energy in his blood. It tries to touch him where Danaë is too in love with the earth to think of it.
“When you know the answer to that you’ll know better than to ask me if my magic makes me sad.” The meadowlark sings through her throat and the clever fox watches him through her eyes. In between their broken chests a seed spore starts to grow tiny, and too frail to break through the soil.
And Danaë feels the agony of that spore too, as it struggles to stay far, far from the peace of death.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
hey were not dead when you picked them. Your flowers were in agony but not dead, not until me. Aeneas had never thought of it that way and there is a moment when he feels regret so sharp it pierces him. He studies her, then, with eyes like slate that do not understand but desperately want to. Aeneas wants to understand. He wants to understand, in part, because watching her bring life to something that should not live enchants him. It enchants Aeneas because he takes; but the things he can create do not animate themselves, cannot yet be touched.
Aeneas studies her, with eyes cool and dark and stone-like, because he does not want to feel so alone in his misunderstanding of himself. But when she speaks, this unicorn with a soft voice and a body the color of a blooded lamb, Aeneas learns that she does not misunderstand herself.
Tell me which of us is the killer and which of us is mercy, she says, a statement and not a question. But Aeneas watches her horn tilt up, up, up, and says, “You.” Because he knows in the way he can feel her as one feels a void—there is nothing positive, nothing negative. She simply is, where he draws and changes and channels everything around him. Where he becomes a point of friction, a funnel for all that is bad far easily than for all that is good.
Her rose grows just as her horn points and he watches it with awestruck eyes. He has never seen a black rose before; has never known one to exist. When it touches him, he is assured that it is real and not imagined.
“I don’t think I’ll ever know the answer in the way you want me to,” Aeneas says, perhaps a little coyly. But he says it because she is less girl and more world and he does not think he will ever recover from his envy of that.
the boy who looks all soft and angel doesn't make it out alive
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
The
way the light catches across the dapples of his coat makes her wonder if she can forget something she has not yet learned. Her thoughts wander towards some resolution, some epiphany, that she has not yet realized she must reach. The blood in her veins shifts, and smolders, and billows like a cloud, until Danaë feels like she has become a horizon instead of a unicorn.
As if she has become the end of their world instead of the end of death. And she wonders, oh she wonders so furiously, what might be discovered if she plummets over the edge of herself like a wingless bird.
What might she be able to divine from the glimmer in his eyes that has nothing to do with the refraction of the sun (his father's sun) upon the edge of her horn. Does he see a horizon there?
Can he see what might be, what is becoming, on the other side of her?
She does not tell him how she doubts that he knows the difference between mercy and killing. She does not tell him to follow her back to her sister's side so that she might have Isolt open her mouth wide. She does not not tell him how he only has to look down her twin's throat, and lay his brow across her teeth, to discover just how much of the world he does not know. She only sighs, a lamenting whisper of bell-chime across moss-and-ivy stone.
He would not understand, she thinks, if she carved the answers in what little of him Isolt would leave behind.
Vines, and flowers, and roses flutter against her doe-frail legs as if to tell her settle unicorn, settle when she starts to wonder if she could be Isolt so he would not have to wait.
“You will not.” She agrees with that lamenting sound of chime on moss and ivy. A rose at her hip, white as the one touching him is black, taps at her hock again. This time it does not tell her to settle and it does not call her unicorn.
The rose only tap, tap, taps as she steps closer to him. And that rose's children follow her as she moves. “But would you like to Aenas?”
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
