I wonder how I can always feel like this -- like I am one mouthful away from starving, one breath away from drowning, one step away from tumbling from the end of the earth. I wonder if it ever stops, this aching, this anger that makes me want to tear the world open root by root, tendon by tendon.

But then again, I don't know what I would be without it. And I don't think I want to know.

---

Sometimes, she likes to come to the edge of the forest and pretend she is standing on the edge of another world. From the shelter of the trees she watches the snow sparkle in the sunlight, broken up only by the snowshoe hares and winter foxes flashing quick as teeth in the open.

She watches now, as one rabbit leaps a second too late for the safety of its den.

And as the fox trots triumphantly through the snow, prize firmly caught in its jaws, the wind sings a warning down the spiral of her horn. You would be next, it promises with each step the fox takes that she is not following in pursuit. And when she grows bored of watching it live without fear, Isolt turns and drags her horn down the nearest tree until the bark cries and bleeds sap. The fox breaks out into a long-strided lope that carries it swiftly out of range, and another part of her heart feels like it is falling like a rotten leaf from a vine to watch as it does.

Maybe that is why she steps out from between the trees for the first time. Why her hooves cut through the unmarred snow like a knife, and all she thinks is how lovely it sounds to hear the ice crust shatter. The cold presses in against her skin and she welcomes it like the grim reaper welcomes the dying home.

She might have lain down and pretended to be dead then, entombed in an icy grave, if she hadn’t seen the other unicorn first.

Isolt points at it with her horn, lets that hollow bit of blood bone lead the way as she cuts across the prairie. Her war-drum heart races along faster than life inside of her chest, screams at a pitch that does not match the steady way she marches through the snow. A part of her hopes she looks like death coming to greet the other unicorn, hopes the girl will shiver and turn to run like the fox at the sight of her (so that she could chase her and make up for all the other things she should have followed to the grave.)

But instead they meet like shy wolves studying each other across the snow, circling like two things that have only ever known how to take and consume, to be the predator and never the prey. And Isolt aches to reach out and carve lines into her pale skin.

She feels more like a god than a unicorn when she lifts her head and studies her. Because she smells like the sea, like rotten, saltwater-sodden wood floating in the ocean, like flotsam caught in the tides. And even without having seen the sea before, Isolt knows it smells something like death.

“I think you should be dead.” Her voice waivers in the sunlight, like she wants nothing more than to turn back to the darkness of her forest (and to drag Avesta back there with her.)

She wants to ask her when she died, how she died, why she died, but more than that —

Isolt wants to ask her why she didn’t stay dead.

But instead she is silent, and only her eyes speak all the accusations her heart is singing like a whetstone to a blade.

---

There are bones to be found laying along its shore, when the oceans dry up and turn to deserts. I want to know what the sea looks like, when it’s broken apart and spilled like blood in a forest. I want to hear how loudly the sea-gods scream when the mangroves laugh and grow twisted and bloated on their salt tears.

All gods are jealous gods.

---

There is war in the other unicorn’s laughter, and a battlefield in the frozen space that separates them. In it she can feel the snow groaning, and cracking, and splitting apart like bones tossed in a fire. Dead things are turning over in their graves when she traces flower patterns overtop them with the blade of her tail.

And all the while Isolt is smiling, with all the teeth of a wolf chasing after a dragon shining bright and hungry in her mouth.

It is not a kind smile.

There is the thrill of the hunt crawling like disease down the hollow curls of her horn when she angles towards the girl who looks so much like a winter sea. And there is a long moment in which Isolt wonders if it is blood or saltwater filling her veins. The sleeping-meadow around them is quiet, so quiet —  already she can hear the notes of a dead-sea-song rising like a wave between them, all its drowned voices singing beneath bracken tide pools.

She does not know the notes of that song. Her’s has always been of the forest, of unmarked graves and seed turning to rot and roots growing through empty joints like nooses dragging them down. But when she lifts her head and points her horn at the lonely winter sky (the unicorn’s only way of peace), she thinks —

“I do not forget.” Her blood is humming like a storm-cloud over the water, grown fat and heavy with brine. Lightning cracks sharp and bright behind her eyes. “I remember the face of every dead thing in my forest, and where to find them. I know their bones like my own.”

But they were all asleep now. And the unicorn’s blood felt very much alive, leaping along the curve of her jaw. Isolt licks her lips, swallows down the storm threatening to drown them both in fury.

And still, she can not stop the thunder from rolling through her belly like famine when she curls her tail towards the other girl’s legs. “But perhaps you could teach me what dead things below the sea look like.”

She thinks she could learn many songs, if she cut the notes of them free.

Isolt is not the reaper hurrying along after death. She is a goddess as much as she is a mortal, and she does not wait on anyone.

---

There is something about the sound of another unicorn’s heart beating along to the rhythm of death. And never is there a moment where I stop and think that it is wrong to want to kill another unicorn, or to pick my teeth clean on the tip of her horn (her horn, so much straighter than my own, like it doesn’t know how to be hollow with hunger.)

There is never I moment where I stop. Because death does not know how to wait.

---

It only takes hearing it once for Isolt to decide she hates the sound of laughter.

It makes her jaw begin its aching anew, as her teeth grind together like things reshaping themselves against a stone. She wonders how long it would take before they are as sharp as the other unicorn’s. She wonders if her smile could ever be as terrible (and as lovely) as a girl with a mouth like a shark’s.

And she wonders, oh she wonders if the blood would taste any sweeter than it already does in the mouth of a monster. Always she wonders.

The snap of the wolf’s teeth at her tail does not to stop her from reaching, and reaching, and reaching across the fragile space between them like a blade cutting through a screen. It does not stop when the girl’s laughter spills like blood from a slashed throat. It does not stop at the warning rolling like thunder across her storm-cloud skin, loud enough she can feel the echo of it in her bones. It only taps out its own warning on the ice that is beginning to look wrong, and empty, and dull without blood to gorge itself on.

It is still tapping when she steps forward and traces the light catching on every sharp line of the girl’s smile. And Isolt does not need to wonder anymore if they are aching like her own, or if her horn is any less a sword or a spear or a weapon made for carving out hearts and eating them.

She knows then that the stillness of the empty meadow is only a world feigning dead as it watches two unicorns with war drums for hearts. And if she was any less of a thing made in magic she might have turned then and gone back to her forest, and carved out the sap and frozen hearts of a dozen trees that would never again know the warmth of spring. If it were not for the brine in the girl’s veins calling out to the rot in her’s, she might have heard the forest weeping over the sound of her own hunger.

“There is only one way you could show me,” she promises, because there is only one way that matters and already she is imagining what her skull would look like at the bottom of the ocean, stripped of its flesh by predator fish, seaweed tangled around her horn.

And then, softer, “wouldn’t you like to go home?” as she reaches across the pretending-to-be-dead distance and traces the scales beneath her eyes with her blade.

---

Everything in me is begging to take her black horn between my teeth and pull, and pull, and pull until both of us are bleeding. And I wonder if her blood would be more brine or magic, and which of the two would taste better.

I have never needed the permission before.

---

Perhaps it she was less of a monster and more of a unicorn, or a girl who had gotten to learn the innocence of being a child — perhaps then she might have recognized the warning in the other girl's eyes as something to be feared. That there was danger in two beasts who refused to relent, or go gently, or do anything but lunge straight for the throat.

And maybe she would have felt anything but the way her heart settles into a familiar death-knell of a rhythm that begs her to use teeth, and horn, and blade, and all the ways her magic is whispering to her of how to kill a dead thing. Every violent part of her is rising in her throat to meet the rage in another unicorn's eyes, and Isolt pauses only for a moment to wonder if it is more holy or profane that she should be so willing to consume her for it.

She smiles.

And the only answer she gives is in the way she moves her blade against than moonlight pale cheek like a caress (like she knows how to be gentle — but it is only ever a lie.) She taps there, bone to flesh, like she is tapping against a shell and listening to see if the sea answers her.

She tells herself this, when she presses the tip of it hard enough against her cheek to break the skin: just one drop of blood to take with her when she goes. Just one taste to remember her by.

But one drop had never been enough. Not for her. Not for the endless pit of rot that lies in her stomach, ready and waiting to eat, and eat, and eat.

Even now it is begging for more. Even now it is telling her how much better Avesta would look if she were dead, how lovely a garden her bones would make, how beautiful the flowers her sister would grow from them would be.

The way her teeth shine in the winter light is more snarl than smile. And that is the only warning she knows how to give before her tailblade twists to flay the scales off of a silver cheek, and she drops her blood red horn to her throat.

---

I was born singing the songs of war from other worlds, in other lives, in other ages. And I was made remembering the way bones break beneath swords, and horns, and teeth, I was made to raise armies from all the skeletons left behind and forgotten.

I was made to end unicorns who think their wars were the only wars that mattered in this world.

It is why I was given an empty space between my lungs instead of a heart.

---

If there was ever a moment where Isolt has looked up at the stars and wondered why she was a creature made instead of a daughter born, the answer is there in the rage she can feel echoing in the other unicorn’s bones.

And if ever she wanted to ask if there was a way to make the hunger end or the pain stop, she is not thinking of it now when their horns become weapons instead of weights. She is not thinking of anything but the pulse in the other girl’s throat, the seawater-blood that lures her in in a way no siren song ever could.

Every bear, and coyote, and vulture is screaming at the violence in her eyes that promises a banquet about to be laid out. Below it all she can hear nothing else. She can feel nothing else. She can see

nothing

else.

Only the promises carved into her bones that tell her that one day, some day, she will unmake the world. And Isolt does not stop to ask it if today is that today (perhaps it is because she already knows the answer, and that answer makes her blood turn black and thick and terrible.)

But at the feel of teeth against her skull her rage turns to a snarl, to a whine, to finally a keening sound that she does not recognize as her own.

The only question that is left then is in the whimper hanging like seeds from her teeth. The wondering that sets in next, that insatiable desire that wants to scream and scream and rage at the magic that made her, oh how it burns.

All this hunger gnawing at her ribs, whittling them into spears.

All this pain of growing too quickly and still not quickly enough, of this pool of rage festering black and dark in the depths of her and not enough means to fill it.

Isolt was made with a war inside of her veins begging her to rend, and ruin, and consume. But she was born not knowing how to stop it, or control it, or how to form it into something she can wield. She is an explosion that burns out too fast.

And with the wolf’s claws at her belly, and his weight driving her down, still that dark pit begs for more. Still she wants to snarl around the pain, to tear herself open on another monster’s fangs if only to know once and for all that nothing — not even death — will make the pain of being a thing-made-with-too-much-hunger stop.

And she relents only as all wild things do: with the promise of next time. Tomorrow she will be stronger. Tomorrow she will learn from this. Tomorrow she will be more a weapon and less a girl.

Today she falls to her knees, and she is not sure if the roar in her chest is more hatred or reverence.

And never has she felt so young as she does from the ground.

---