solt does not have any time for the shops with their weeping walls and their priceless treasures waiting like lambs for the slaughter.

And she has no heart to listen to the screaming wall beneath the weeping one, or to see the pattern of the city spiraling up, and up, and up the same way her horn does when she lifts it to the sky. Isolt is not mortal enough to see anything but the way the inside of the city feels like standing within the ribcage of a giant beast she thinks she once knew the name of. And when she rakes her tail across the opaline floor the wailing sound it makes seems to her like all those star-skeletons coming back to life, like a memory half-forgotten coming back as a ghost.

And what is a ribcage she wonders, but a thing made to guard a heart?

So that is where she goes, with the tip of her bloody horn leading the way. Straight to the heart of the city.

And oh! Maybe this is the reason Isolt has no heart of her own to care for the living: because it is here instead, rooted in the belly of an island that feels as though it were made for her.

Her walk turns to a trot, then a run, then a gallop in which she stretches out long and low and loses herself in the furious beat of her hooves cracking the bone-dry ground with every step. And never does she stop to look down, or to wonder where the heart of the city (her heart) lies. When it calls to her, she can feel it echoing inside of her chest with every beat. Come, it says, come, come, come —

so she does. And with every step rot is blooming from her hoofprints like flowers, specks of black forming arcane patterns that only she would know the meaning of. The walls grow thick with it, and the bone-pillars crack and fill each crevice with curled ribbons of bone pretending to be leaves, and berries, and dreams.

She runs until the throne rises up bright and terrible before her. And seated on that throne —

is her heart.

And wrapped around her heart is a ribcage that is not her own, bones and driftwood twisted into the shape of a prison. There are flowers there, and teeth, and leaflets of poison ivy, and eyes staring back at her. Somewhere a mouth pulls back into a smile, and something trembles to behold it (and oh! how the ground shakes with its tremblings.)

Her heart beats out its sorrow on the throne. Her chest aches in answer.

And Isolt listens to the keening of her tailblade as she scrapes it along the throne room floor, bone against bone, a wail rising through the hollow throne room.

Perhaps it was the weepings walls, or the glittering jewels that had drawn her like a moth to flame, but she’d somehow found herself in the beating heart of Novus. The ground pulsed with magic, the very walls screaming as her limbs led her mindlessly down the opal streets of the crystal city. Frost followed her every step, catching the attention of shop owners who glanced at her with strange faces, watching silently, never moving. Inside, she witnessed tapestries strewn together with dreams, vivid and ever changing - just as the island did.

Everything here reeked of an oddness she couldn’t quite comprehend, something otherworldly and impossible to understand; and at its center was the castle. Dial lifting, the ice coated dame’s gaze followed the spheres that reached high above, grasping at the empty space between them and the cave ceiling, which emitted a faint glow. Precious metals blinked at her, mocking her own uniqueness in this mad world in which she’d stumbled into. Perhaps she belonged here.. For once they didn’t stare because she was different, they stared because she acted as if she didn’t blossom from the deep earth beneath them, as they had; what a strange world indeed.

~

The vastness of the throne roomed drew breath from her cold lungs, gasps escaping her in clouds of vapor as her frigid gaze settled upon the girl. Alone, the blood spattered creature stood, a sentinel, silently screaming at the world around her, the air seemed to ripple with something grotesque, something entirely unnatural. Zhavvorsi was intrigued.

Suddenly, a hauntingly beautiful melody escaped her closed lips, echoing about the throne room as she hummed. It was eerily quiet, it stretched on for eons, shattering the limits of mortality and carrying on forever as those lonely lyrics danced around them.
Zhavvorsi's voice dripped from her silken lips, coated in honey.
the words lilted, mimicking the chords of a riddle, swaying across the space of the throne room as a dancer.

There was no fear in Zhavvorsi’s eyes as she looked into the cursed child’s ruby eyes, because for once in her horrible life, perhaps she witnessed herself there. Or maybe, Zhavvorsi simply wanted another to understand her, for the sizzling of her skin in the heat of that cavernous room could never dull the tune of her humming, even with the glares of the masses upon her - the ringing in her skull could never explain the frost that coated her skin.
No, perhaps the icy song in her soul could translate the macabre chorus spilling from the bizarre creature staring back at her.


~~~

Words: 461
Tags: @Isolt
OOC: Sorry, wanted to get in on the island mischief!

solt is carving scars into the throne room floor when the other mare enters. Each step brings her closer to the throne, closer to her heart, closer to the dare those deadwood ribs wrapped around it are whispering to her.

And every steps makes that wave of violence in her empty chest to rise a little bit higher, and crash a little bit harder, and swell again faster than before. She does not have the heart to listen to a song sung in a language she does not know (any language besides that of rot, and violence, and rage is lost on her.) And she is not mortal enough to do anything but look up, and up, and up, and when those terrible ivy eyes blink at her and smile, Isolt blinks back at it. It is not a unicorn, or a princess, or any other lovely thing that pulls its lips back in a look that is more snarl than smile.

But at that word — we — her ears flicker back against her skull. And all her rage that was waiting like gasoline in her veins begins to ignite.

The only we that exists for Isolt lives in the spaces between her heartbeat and her sister’s. And every other heart in the world — every single one — exists only for monsters like her to cut them free of their chests and lay them out as offerings to themselves.

“We will do nothing at all.” The words sound like dead things falling from between her teeth. The walls echo her voice back to her as if each syllable and sound of it is the beginning of war. And still she does not look back, or stop in her advance, or pause to wonder what kind of horses sing songs when looking at the belly of a beast.

On the throne, her heart is beginning to weep blood. Isolt stops only when she is face to face with it, close enough to reach out and trace the tangled lines of driftwood and bone wrapped around it like nooses tied together. And if feels to her like someone is carving lines down her own ribs, and cutting open her own arteries, and oh, oh, oh! how the marrow in her bones sets to trembling.

But she does not stop. As every inch of her skin begins to crawl like her blood is coming awake as it bleeds out of her, she only drives the points of her blade deeper into the wood. Light gathers along the hollow curls of her horn when she lifts her head like a wolf instead of a unicorn. And when she turns her head, slowly, just enough to look over one shoulder at the frost-covered mare, she wonders if it is violence of madness that lingers there in her bloody gaze.

She wonders if there is a difference between the two after all.

With a single violent stroke, she cuts through the first root.

And just like that, the throne room descends into chaos as the walls set to weeping and screaming at once, and the remaining vines wrap tightly around the throne, and the ground begins to convulse.