There’s something calling for me, somewhere in the woods. With its final breath it names me Death, its last heartbeat makes for me a warning to follow. And when the death tremors set in, I tap my horn and move to its rhythm.

Most of the time, I do not know what I am looking for.

But I keep looking. And with every dying tree and rotting skeleton I come across, I ask myself, is this it?

---

She liked the way the forest sounded in winter. She liked the way the snow blanketed the trees in white, weighed them down like tethers, unable to free themselves from its hold. She liked the silence of a dead-and-hiding world, when the snow hares pressed close together in their dens and the only birds she saw were flying away from her, from the forest — never towards.

But even more, she liked the sound nature made when it gave up the fight at last.

The snapping of a limb echoes in the young-winter quiet, a sharp crackling sound that splits the world in two. Isolt stops to listen, and when she tilts her head like a wolf and peers into the forest it is like something in that dying tree speaks only to her. And whatever it is saying, makes her tail cut lines into the earth.

She does not feel like something living, when she turns deeper into the forest. Living things did not chase the sound of dying things the way she did, but knew to fly away like the birds. The thought makes her bare her teeth in an almost-smile, and her tail carves all the faster into the snow.

But this time —

This time, Isolt is not the first to find the waiting corpse staining the winter red.

She watches from the darkness between the trees, as the girl (gray, like the winter skies) digs away the snow shrouding the small corpse like a funeral veil. Everything in her is waiting, and wanting, and wondering — and if there is understanding, she does not show it. Isolt has never thought to bury the dead before. It has never been needed, not when the dead were only going to claw their way free later in the night.

When she finally drags herself out of the shadows, her tailblade whistles quietly through the snow like a promise of violence.

For one long moment, Isolt says nothing. She only looks from the stiffened, rent-open body to the masked girl holding it by the tail, then back again in silence. When she finally speaks it feels like she is chewing on the words, so that they come out slower than living things ought to speak. “Why are you disturbing the dead,” her voice is a whisper that does not lift the way a question should — it is only flat, like the words were dead before they left her lips.

In that moment, Isolt looks nothing like a unicorn should, has none of the innocence or incandescence of her twin. In fact — she looks more like the dead thing Bird pulls from the snow.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see

✧


ead things are stupidly stubborn, even without a soul to fill them up and keep them warm.

My breath leaves me in spurts as I stumble into a patch of nettles when my hold slips and I pull out a chunk of fur from a mottled grey tail instead of budging the carcass whole from the bloody snow. There is fur from something dead in my mouth and my tongue turns thick and decaying. 

My mood spoils like milk as I spit the fur out in flurries, like dandelion seeds, before I can figure out what it tastes like.

I am working up to proper infuriation when I breathe out once very slowly and remind myself that Rook will feel it if I do, and that it’s really very silly to be furious at a thing so long dead. Ma used to tell me to conserve my emotions. That they must be carefully rationed, like water in a desert, to be used up a little at a time and keep me from one day drying up.

Grimacing, I shake snow off my tail feathers and push up my mask until its cracked orange beak gawks a hello to the blustery sky. I begin digging again. The snow shroud is harder and more packed down than I’d thought, almost to ice; my hoof scrapes off individual, ruined snowflakes. I begin counting the number of scrapes in my head, to give myself something to do.

(And to distract from the tingling in my spine that won’t stop, no matter how many times I look over my shoulder. It’s a difficult thing, to dig up a body and shake off eyes from your back all while pretending like none of it bothers you. If I wasn’t so sure I had an audience I would’ve dropped this act after scrape number seven.)

When I am certain the snow is cleared away enough now to let its quarry go—I've scraped off so many snowflakes that tiny blades of brown grass peek out at me—I sigh before taking the tail back into my mouth and giving it a jerk. The body moves with a soft whoosh towards me and I almost smile, before I remember my shy, haunting audience and force it back down. I must remain unbothered. That way, they won't bother me. 

That's what Ma always said. Sometimes I was almost disappointed with how well it worked.

Freed from its shallow grave of ice and snow, the dead thing is light and barely-there as it dangles helplessly from my mouth. Empty of a soul and a bellyful of guts, I suppose, lightens you up to air. I wonder if I am still being watched. My spine has stopped tingling yet I am not so sure it is because the visitor has left, or because—

“Why are you disturbing the dead.” 

There is an eviscerated carcass between my teeth and I cannot scream. Though, I don't think I would have anyway—I am not easily frightened, and the voice is too whispery, like wind rustling the petals of flowers, for me to worry about the girl it belongs to.

She is red, like blood, and white, like snow. I wonder briefly, my eyes blinking slow, if she is so worried about the carcass because she was made from it—pieces of soul stapled together, a body to house it in sculpted hastily from the bloodied snow. 

But that is witchcraft, and of Elder's variety, and if it were Elder's magic I would've smelled it before it could ever have smelled me.

I drop the carcass so I can speak and smile a little when it hits the snow with a soft thump. My mask is still raised up like a prayer to the Goddess' sky; it makes it easier to look at her, and let her see that I am looking at her, instead of hiding cowardly behind a mask that can't even smile. My hair is done up in looping braids like vines today, sprigs of swan-necked snowdrops tucked tight into every woven strand. 

I tuck a braid behind my ear and nudge at the flopped-over carcass with my hoof.

“This?” I say, my voice echoic through the chill and setting dark. “... Because you shouldn't leave dead things just lying around. We'd be overrun by them before too long.” There is a flake of dried blood on my braid and I frown down at it; I blow breathfuls of air over it until it flutters off to the ground.

When I look back at the girl of blood and snow (who is so still except for the slice slice slice of her tail that it begins to irritate me) I remember my manners and ask her carefully, my voice as delicate as snowdrops, “Does it belong to you?”