I do not belong in this library.

I can feel the way the building itself does not want me here — for centuries it has guarded its secrets against monsters like me. For centuries it has lived on despite all the things that want to destroy it. And I can’t help but think of that as a warning, as I drag the tip of my horn down a row of books just to watch their titles that I cannot read crumble to dust.

he walks between the rows of books like she is searching for something. For what, she does not know — only that she is looking for the answers in a library full of books she cannot read (it is the one lesson her mother has not taught her; Thana, monster-mother that she is, cannot read herself.)

Still, she is searching.

It is the first time she has been to the library. It feels wrong to visit without her sister at her side, without her twin to help her carve the life from the tree-gods that make up these walls. That is the echo that her heart beats out as she walks — wrong, wrong, wrong — that is the song the blade of her tail taps along the floor behind her, breaking the silence of the library.

Someone shushes her. Isolt swings her gaze to them like a noose, the wrath of the guillotine thundering in her teeth.

And then with her tail she pulls a book from the shelves. It clatters against the floor, its pages spilling open like a secret being revealed to the world.

Isolt pulls down another. And another. And another. As she walks through the hallways she pulls down more books, and scrolls, and paintings and flings them across the ground. In her wake mushrooms balloon over top of them, moss curling upon their edges, their ink fading. She smiles to herself.

She might have turned the entire library inside out were it not for the unicorn with skin nearly as red as her own. And not only was her skin red — but so were the roses that lined her neck (bent elegantly over a page. Isolt thinks this is the way she ought to carry her neck from now on, in an arch that is as much elegance as it is sharp.) That aching, that feeling that she is searching for something, returns stronger than ever.

So she inches forward, step by step, as the quill splits and the ink spills and the girl stands. She steps forward until she is peering over her shoulder at the page and whispering into her ear.

“What,” she points with her horn at the ink that has rolled down the page like a stain (like blood, only the wrong color), “is that?”

And when she slides her bloody gaze from the page to the girl’s, there is a hunger in her eyes that she does not think she recognizes. A hunger for something other than death, other than destruction, a hunger for —