The darkness of the forest, beneath the church-steeple pines, has never seemed like true darkness to her. In each shadow, and each shadow pressed upon a shadow, she can see a hundred colors laid down upon each other. She can see the faded rust of pine-needles, the violet darkened where a field mouse hurries past, the blue of a bruise where the light almost dapples the edges of a shadow tree. Between all the colors her white seems more like a scar in the forest that a color made from the very ichor of Viride.
Isolt had always been better suited to the forest-- more predator than lost ghost caught between roots and towering trunks.
Today her thoughts and all the sorrows of the buried Eira are hers and hers alone. She can feel each aching loss like a crack in her frail glass heart. Her stomach gnaws at itself like a sick fox when she feels all their hunger for leaf, and flower, verdant meadow grass. Each time she blinks the backs of her eyes flashes white, white, white with the memories of a child killed for land, greed, and power.
Danaë feels wrath then.
Her blood races faster than the Rapax with the fury of a hundred victims of a senseless war. The pace of her steps turns slower, more hunting wolf than doe galloping through the darkness in search of green. And in what light, what little light there is in the kaleidoscope darkness, makes the red of her eyes seem like fire instead of dried blood.
In her shadow a field mouse, one that had died in a late frost, rises from the dirt to dance around her hooves on paws of lichen. His eyes, bright and young poppy flowers, lift up to look at the curl of her stomach like she’s the moon fallen into the thick forest. The risen mouse’s war cry is almost nothing more than a shrill and painful bleat that Danaë can hardly hear in the echo of the child’s wrath.
She does not notice him, not until they turn together and her vision fractures into her-sight and the risen-sight as they both consider the crack, crack, crack of some not-ghost walking through their forest.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
There are too many war-ton soldiers who dream of their dead friends, I think. Carthage taught me that. When he quit drinking, Oma sent me to take care of him. I was meant to fetch him water and give him food, but instead I mostly listened. I listened to his screaming. I listened to the way the room was full of ghosts of men who died. I began my belief as a boy, in our cottage on the cliffside with a garden full of dead things. My mother’s family could never afford funeral pyres and so they were buried in the most ignoble of ways; in that garden full of unmvnicured, unkempt rose bushes, a garden gone berserk with time and lack of care. At night, when my mother did not come home, I would lay awake and listen to the groaning of the wood. I would swear I heard footsteps, or voices entangled in a conversation where the words were indistinct.
I have always believed in ghosts. But Chara taught me how real they are; how they are waiting to be noticed. When I first found her, she told me she was killed by gods angry at her mother for being in love. Gods who made men and women from marble to fight their wars. Gods who were selfish, and cruel, and still so, so magical. Chara taught me ghosts are a bit of magic; and that our souls, too, are magic.
The Viride is magic; it is magic in the way of things older than gods, older than thought. In the quiet woods, there is an aura of life and death and something magnificent, something larger than self. Perhaps it is the way they overshadow me. The way they obscure even the sky. Perhaps it is the way in which I see the girl through the trees.
At first, I believe I imagined her. The glimpse is as flitting as a bird in flight; as brief as a shooting star. I am wandering aimlessly, wondering how deep the forest goes—and I see her like a ghost. I believe her to be a ghost.
Until I see her again, through another series of boughs. Again and again. It is only when True stiffens beside me that I take greater note. It is only when his hackles rise and he glances at me with wide-eyed fear that I realize perhaps this is not a ghost and walk toward her.
(I have always thought it is polite to leave the dead alone; a sort of necessity. Chara taught me otherwise. Chara taught me the dead are waiting to speak, to those who will listen). And it is Chara who says to me, Be careful, Khier and the closer I get I recognize why. There is a scream; high-pitched to the point of being nearly inaudible. I flinch, but remain undeterred. She does not turn at first. And then she does; and when she does, my approach feels too loud, too boisterous, the forest breaking underfoot and True’s stiffness becoming a growl.
There is the strangest thing I have ever seen at her feet. I do not look. I purposefully, do not look.
God-magic, Chara whispers. Life and death magic. Or is it fantasy magic?
Maybe it is ghost magic.
“I saw you through the trees,” I confess. “You looked like a ghost.”
This close, I am still not sure she isn’t. The emerald stone is beat, beat, beating against my chest. I ask, in a voice for church, a voice for prayer: "What do you know of this forest?"
There has always been this feeling in her, this wanting outside the wanting of the empty bones waiting for spores, that she has never been able to name. It follows her into her dreams when she runs through constellations made out of empty sockets, and hollow joints, and sinew lines drawing out stories. The feeling haunts her every step and it feels nothing like the earth dappling in half-moons below the fragile weight of her. Like a phantom shadow made of stone and oil it nips at her heels every time she tries to dance to the war her mother can hear.
It is following her now, haunting her now, as she flickers her risen-vision and self-vision between hound and mortal. And still, as she steps towards him, she cannot name it as it deepens like a church tower through her throat and burrows like a weed into her soul. The howling sound it makes, as she exhales in a sighing lament, seems so much louder as it echoes against the inside of her skull.
This feeling, this nameless feeling, aches when the sound of a growl breaks the silence before anything else does.
But it is not that feeling that turns her bloody gaze to the hound in a look that promises this forest does not belong to the dogs of mortals. It belongs to gods, and god-unicorns, and eira-gods buried and rotten beneath their hooves. The look says back as much as it says heel.
And it is that feeling that shifts only her own vision back to the stallion and smiles with a pale, echoing flash of not amusement but understanding. “I think I might be one.” She says, or rather that feeling says, in a whisper that is as god-like as his voice is prayer-soft. Only whispers bring miracles when roars like her sister’s are made to smite.
Lichen, and roses, and mushrooms as golden as the dawn, move closer to him as she does. They haunt her and still she cannot name what it is that glows in her own heart like a spore in a risen. Her smile falls deeper and deeper into whisper and lament. “There is nothing I do not know about this forest.” Another whisper, as she lifts her horn from where it had instinctively angled towards his throat.
The risen, with all his own thoughts and none of Danaë’s, curls up upon the blade of her tail to peer at the hound like he had once before when his eyes were not poppies and his paws were not moss.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
