There is a snarl rising in her throat. She is choking on it, drowning in it — it fills her lungs like water and she, oh, she —

She is smiling as she takes death between her teeth and pulls.

And she is smiling as she steps closer, and closer, and tastes the recklessness hanging like a veil around him. She fills her belly with his arrogance, grows drunk on his confidence — and when he grins back at her she is counting his teeth like pearls. And Isolt wonders how much prettier they might look strung upon one of his tendons, so that they might hang around her neck instead.

Isolt does not tell him that he is wrong (but oh! how she wants to!). But it is there in her eyes, in the blood-red determination of them that sparks like embers in a fire. And it is there in the very fabric of her being, in the magic that is printed across her veins, her bones, her muscles that whispers to her yes, yes, yes when she leans forward and wonders, is this it?

Is this what I was made for?

Her mother had told her the story of her creation once, only once. And Isolt had listened to it in quiet rapture, drinking in every inch of her mother’s bloody beginning until she had dreamed rivers of it. And when she had slipped away into the gardens that night she had pretended that she was the unicorn named Death, because Thana had promised to her that all the world would bow to her one day.

That one day could not come soon enough. Not for a unicorn born of seed and hunger, of rage and love. Not for the girl who was born remembering winters from years past, who was knitted together with the magic of the Rift and of gods.

“You are not death,” the blade of her tail carves out her rage in lines across the earth. “You do not know what death is, but I—“ I will show you, the violent color of her eyes promises.

The plants he killed turns to dust at her hooves in an instant, until mold and lichen are blossoming over the bones of it. And even as the swamp-child gasps and wilts the circle of death around her hooves only grows, and grows, and grows. It grows until her rage and her sorrow and her hunger turns every plant and grass and flower as black as her heart, until the ground beneath his own hooves releases its life with a gasp. The bones in the earth tremble, a egret raising its sun-bleached beak high into the air, an alligator tightening its jaw with vines instead of muscles.

And Isolt does not waiver. She steps forward and each step is the death of another root, and stem, and petal, and leaf. She steps forward and lays her horn like a promise against his brow, bone touching the soft gold of his antlers.

“Because all things must die,” she whispers against his skin, “and the dead will become my army.”

And she presses harder.



§

i wonder what i look like
in your eyes

He will know when he meets Danae how they are twins, how strange magic blooms like death at their will. In the moment when he realises, as he meets this girl’s twin, he will think not just of how they are so utterly similar, but how they are so different too.


Leonidas knows he will not die here, today. He knows it is not his time because Time whispers it over his skin. Not yet it says. Ever a young, curious boy he thinks to ask it, If not now then when? but Time does not let him know things like that. Such things are for his mother alone to know. She is the one who can travel Time and its magic. She could take him to the place where he dies and he would look, curious, to see whether there is a girl with blood red skin and crimson-wanting eyes stood over him with death upon her lips and stained down her horn.


“It is not my time to die.” The boy says as she presses closer. He thinks of all the unicorn girls he has met: each one has pressed their horns upon his antlers and carved their warnings deep into his tines. He wonders if he bears the mark of them all now, like runes, pointing to the old, dangerous magics of unicorn girls born into war and death and justice. 


This unicorn girl, she steps closer and closer. He lets her come, finding stillness, almost as if she is an enchantress, her eyes a form of hypnosis. His blood sings for her, his heart beats wetly in her chest and he wonders, at his end, how much blood he would spill at her command. Leonidas does not deny her his corpse for her war. He does not deny her anything but his death today.


Her horn presses against a tine. They meet with the sounds of swords upon a battlefield. He is used to this noise, it has become the music with which each encounter with a unicorn girl is danced to. Like metal to metal their horns cry out when the girl presses harder and steps in. “I do not doubt it,” Leonidas whispers to her like a lion whispers to a tiger. “I will give you my death.” The boy whispers, as if his life is not his own, as if he speaks into a fate he knows nothing of, that he cannot help except fulfill. “But you will have to chase me for it to the end of days.”


The boy leaps away from her. He is nimble and lithe as he leaps over leaves and brush and disappears into the woodland. All the remains is the song of their horns that resounded like the chimes of war. Leonidas wonders if he has made a shadow of her, if the death he lost when he gained immortality has been replaced by this girl, who will hunt him, darkening his spine, her teeth, her ravenous hunger for his death biking at his heels. He would wait for her, his little death and make space for her upon his road of immortality until the day he trips, until the day he looks at her with soft eyes and she leaps at him with sharp teeth and his death held fast between her jaws.


@Isolt <3
“Speaking.”