I S O L T

—
I can feel them watching me. All of them, like sheep listening to the wolf prowling in the shadows beyond the flock. They have decided what I am before I had a chance to decide myself.

Maybe I would have chosen differently.

Maybe that is only a lie I tell myself.
solt does not feel like a princess, or a daughter, or even a girl when she walks down the streets of her father’s city. She does not feel like a thing born at all, or someone who has ever known innocence in the days of their youth.

Perhaps it is right, then, that her father’s people should stare at her like she is other, and fall silent when they see her approaching. Maybe they can see in each predatory step (like she has never known how to walk, only ever how to stalk after her prey), or the shine of her hungry horn when she lowers her head and leads with it. If she were them, if she had ever learned how to look at the world with a mortal’s eyes, and a mortal’s fear of death — she might not have blamed them then for running when they see the shadow of it hunting among them.

As it is, every pair of eyes that turn hurriedly from her’s is another she feeds to the raging thing growing in her belly. She turns her sorrow into swords by which to carve off bits of their flesh for a meal to feed it. And it eats, and it eats, and it eats, and soon enough Isolt finds herself looking for more and more to feed to it.

She is wandering the city again with that searching look in her eyes and that roaring in her chest. Again and again she feels her hooves clipping against the cobblestones, and even when she does not turn back she knows how they crack and turn blackened in her wake, how the bits of algae and mold creep in to fill those gaps. Back and forth through the city she paces, never slowing, never relenting from dawn till dusk —

or she would have, had she not seen him.

A man standing upon the roots of one of her father’s trees (a tree both he and her sister loved), staring up into its outstretched branches. He does not turn to look her way when her footsteps sound upon the ground behind him, he does not look at her with the frightened gaze of a rabbit knowing the fox was walking just above its den.

He looks no different than the other mortals of this place, and yet he does not fear her. Perhaps, he does not yet know he should. But Isolt, the new-god, true-god, made-monster that she is, would teach him.

She does not announce herself.

She does not say a single word to this boy who does not yet realize he should be running (running, like all the others who hastily turn away from the king’s daughter and the violence in her eyes.)

Isolt only curls the blade of her tail like a claw around the trunk of that tree, peeling off bits of bark like skin to scar. And there it tap, tap, taps a warning to him.

§

rotting and rooting
wilting and blooming
@Ceylon

c e y l o n



eylon breathes in the moments between seconds passing by, letting tension fall from his shoulders, pressing it into the world, into the earth beneath him that houses the great tree. How old must it be - this giant - to have withstood storm and sea, creation and death in its branches, in its roots?

Families of birds must live and die here, building their own empires to rule from on high.

He does not let himself wonder if his own father felt godly when he destroyed the world. Or if he felt remorse. Or saw only a sky of ash from fires still burning, a world so golden and ripe he could bite it in two.

By the time Ceylon was old enough to remember anything, the doors were shut and his future decided. There would be only one route to take, one option left bare. His, a bleak existence, a fate decided by a hand that is not his own. Forever cursed, doomed, paying for the mistakes of his father’s hunger that is not his own.

Ceylon looks at the tree with eyes so blue and distant, he could be a ghost begging to fade into its ancient skin just to glimpse the time it has seen, the stories it knows, the pages it would be pressed into and everything it would come to possess.

He does not look at the girl when she stops beside him. Something about her is feral, and maybe, he thinks, she is somehow like his father - starving, craving, rabid.

Like a fool he states “It’s beautiful,” and perhaps this is the only thing alive he has ever allowed such an honor. Isolt is beautiful, but her bones, reaching to the sky, forever still, are moreso. She will rot as all flesh does and in her death will come something that will last, perhaps, longer than her mortal years. A reminder. A remembrance of a once-girl, a wolf with the skin of a horse.

He does not care for rotting things.

But he is interested when she wraps herself about the trunk. Scythe-tail snaps skin from its base, wilts it where it once, moments ago, had been so vividly alive and flourishing.

At last, at last!, the man (barely more than a boy) - who is more mausoleum than he is flesh and bone - looks to the blood red of her skin and bone white of her splashes. The sharpness of her horn is not lost to him. Gently, softly, like the call of a mother to her panicked babe: “Does everything crumble beneath your skin?” Because she would be lovely to remove all that he ruins.

Every malformed cut into wood, every slip of chisel into stone, every window carved wrong. Vanished as though it never was.

And she would be such a beautiful tool under his meticulous eye and careful hands.

I S O L T

—
There are beetles burrowing into the tree. I can feel them, called forward to consume it in the same way my magic consumes it now. There are tracts dug into its skin making homes for disease to root in.

A home for rot, for death, for me.
here is a way about death that has always felt like coming home. She can feel it now beneath the blade of her tail, the way her rot leeches into the tree-veins in place of sap and makes the bark slough off like diseased skin around her touch. If it were not for the mortal standing there with his too-blue eyes (looking at the tree, not at her — looking at the tree the way her father looks at trees), there would have been nothing stopping her from carving line, after line, after line into the old god’s bark.

If she stood there long enough, if she made enough scars into its skin — Isolt knows she could bring the whole thing crashing down.

She wonders what it would make of her, to kill a god. She wonders if the mortals of this world would bow down to her like the new-god, the true-god, the killer of all other gods. She wonders if they would stop looking at her with their hooded gazes, if they would instead offer themselves to her like an all too willing sacrifice (instead of running from the slaughter her gaze has always promised.)

She wonders if it would only make them run all the faster from her.

Sometimes she is jealous, when she looks at all the fragile and mortal things of this world that can look at a tree and see its beauty where she sees only the death of them. And sometimes she hates the way she can not love the same softness that they do, that always (always) her horn is carving away every thread of it before she has a chance to dull the rage that blooms in her chest instead of roses. And she hates — oh, how she hates! — the way it makes them all look at her, like a thing incapable of love, or gentleness, or kindness; a monster-who-should-not-exist.

They are right, of course, about all of those things. But still she hates the way they look at her because of it. Still seeing the way they shy from her when she walks amongst them feel both like a god and a leper, like it is both her birth-right and her curse.

She is expecting him to look at her the same way, when finally he lowers his blue eyes from the tree to the monster cutting lines into its skin.

But he does not.

And Isolt cannot decide if she misses the look or not.

So she pulls the blade of her tail from the bark of the tree, and offers it to him instead. It curls like the dark sickle of the moon between them. “Would you like to find out?” she whispers to him like a promise. And her smile looks too-much like the dark scythe, waiting to swing.

She does not step closer (but oh, she thinks she wants to) to this boy with his distant eyes. She only waits — and a part of her begins to wish.

§

rotting and rooting
wilting and blooming
@Ceylon