I have always wondered what it is about the desert that holds my father’s heart in its fist. Why he should love it so when it refuses to speak to him, to sing for him, to grow the flowers which the forest gives him so readily.

I asked him once, if it was hate instead of love that drew him here, that maybe he did not know the difference between the two.

He had only looked at me, in his quiet way, and told me to go and see it for myself.

o it is that Isolt comes to the desert with her father’s words echoing in her mind. So it is that she is searching for that nameless thing he has found here, the thing that has wrapped itself like a rope around his heart that she is determined to cut. The blade of her tail carves lines into the sand in her wake, a whisper of violence carving the night apart.

It fills and it breaks the silence.

And if the dunes were singing (as her father liked to say they did), they fall silent now when she walks among them.

There is a part of her that will forever understand the violence that echoes in every grain of sand in a way only a unicorn made would know. The wind howling across the dunes is singing the law of the desert to her in all the bright and hungry notes of death. It is screaming as it whistles down the curl of her blade and it makes some part of her, some festering pool of rot barely contained in her chest, break itself open and spill out upon the sand.

She leaves trails of it as she walks, specks of mold and ash filling the scars her tail blade cuts into the sand. And in every shadow of sand and sliver of moonlight arcing across the desert, she is searching for something for her rot to consume, searching for that thing her father loves so much.

Isolt is still searching when she finds the trail of another, of life running parallel to her death. And like the true-death, the true-god that she is, she chases after it.

And she wonders all the way to the Oasis if this is what Ipomoea loves about Solterra.

This thrill of the hunt, this thrill of the violence of the sand calling put to the violence etched into her bones. This, oh this she understands, when she stops at the bank of the pool and lets the water kiss her hooves (like a sinner crawling to the feet of its priest.) That understanding roars in her chest when she watches the man lift his head above the water like another god of the desert. The moonlight turns the water streaming down his face to quicksilver, to god-blood, to the oils of his anointing.

She waits until he comes closer to speak. “Why did you wash the blood away.” Her voice does not lilt the way a question should. It only runs straight as a spear racing for the man’s throat, quieter than the whisper of her tail still carving lines in the sand. And were it not for the glow of her bloody eyes in the moonlight, like wolves waiting in the darkness, he might have seen the second question that lingers below the first.

The wanting of her hungry heart that asks why would you want to forget?

Oh, there is hunger in him. I can feel it there beneath the surface, there in the red of his skin, of the sharpness of his horn, of the bright-white flash of his teeth. It should be a warning sign, it should mean something to me —

but it only makes that pit of magic and anger and sorrow all wrapped together in knots inside of me, begin to purr. And growl. And lay their teeth against my ribs.

he stands there with the water lapping at her ankles and a man and his hounds emerging from the water, and all she thinks is how the world might look when she and her sister at last consume the moon and the sun.

Her made-in-magic heart trembles to see the reflection of it cast on the water behind him. Of that eye-in-the-sky that is watching her, always watching her. Like a god watching the titan, like a war that is brimming.

And Isolt —

Isolt is the wolf who will consume the world in the war that is to come.

So she smiles at that moon, she smiles with every one of her too-bright and too-sharp and too-hungry teeth. And when she turns to the man the smile lives on in the brightness of her eyes.

His horn is moonlight when he raises it in the greeting that all unicorns recognize. And Isolt wants to pull every quicksilver thread from it, to let it run down her brow like moon-kissed water. She wants to watch it drip, and drip, and drip, and spoil as it touches her skin. She wants to see it turn from white to black, from life to rot, to death, to a plague that she will feed back to him.

She wants to consume him — she wants to consume everything. His hounds, the water that clings to his skin, the entire desert her father loves so much. She wants to tear it all down to its bones to give them as a gift to Danaë.

That magic in her blood whispers yes, yes, yes to her heart with every beat. And it begins to feel as though she is holding back a tide when she lets the water kiss her feet like sinners kissing the feet of their priest.

She does not step any farther into the water. She will not let it wash away the memories of the stag, or the meadow hare, or the elk, or the girl from the island — she will not let it take their blood that is still dried in flakes on her horn. That is her’s, and her’s alone to keep. That is her reminder of her risen things, her bright, dead things that come to her each night and run freely on root-and-bone legs.

But she does not tell him any of that. He would not understand that the dead do not scream to her — they cry out to her. They whisper their hopes, their dreams, their memories of living, their hunger. They beg her for hearts to beat with and legs to run on, and she — blessed, merciful god that she is — grants them their wishes.

Instead she only lifts her bright gaze to his, and asks him: ”Who?” Whose screams does he hear? Whose blood does he wear? Whose life did he take? And where? And why? And how can she find them again to grow daisies in their unseeing eyes?

Isolt steps closer to him, and her tail makes a hushing sound in the sand behind her. She steps close enough that she might count the tracks of water running off of his skin like the tears of gods.

“At night, all dead things are awake.” She aches to drag the words across his skin with her teeth. ”Including me.”