There is a whisper of flowers in my lungs. I can feel them falling into my blood like oxygen, can feel them being carried to the deepest parts of me. And I know, I know that they will rot before they ever get there.

I do not know why that makes me sad.

In the gloaming darkness between the fires, the night feels like a fractured thing around her, like a bone half-alive tossed into the flames. As Isolt turns into the darkness she can hear it breaking, can see the cracks of it deepening.

The horses with their eyes like moons tell her it means something, as they press around her. And she wonders how they can bare it, this mockery of thin veils and overlapping worlds, the sacrifice of one thing to another for a false religion. And still she stands there as a young-god before them, when they wrap her in incense and roll their rosemary and their eggs in patterns down her skin.

”For cleansing,” they whispered to her. Isolt had not asked for their names, or for the meaning of the ritual they had offered to her like priests offering praises to their god. She had only watched them with her weighted gaze like a wolf might watch the owl gliding just out of reach in the trees.

But her skin had trembled when they made the first pass around her throat, like something in her was cringing away.

She did not tell them it was useless, trying to purify a monster. She made no effort to let them see how it would not work (it would never work, not for a thing made in magic and violence. They could not take apart the two things integral to her soul.) But still she watches them with her eyes like rubies lit up by the flames. And there is a part of her, below the trembling monster in her skin, that is taking the hope fluttering in her lungs between its teeth.

They dance in circles around her, the moon-eyed horses, weaving patterns in smoke and in the egg pressed to her skin that they say will protect her from the darkness she sees. They offer prayers to their god (the wrong god, she thinks) that the egg will take up whatever darkness they think they see trapped in her skin (which she knows is not trapped there, but is the very thing that holds her together.) Still she watches them make pass after pass after pass, and feels that monster in her skin trembling, and the smoke turning acidic in her lungs, and her blood beginning to boil like a demon they did not mean to awaken but oh, they are.

It is a dangerous thing, for them to stand so close to her as the wave of rot rises higher and higher in the ocean of her body. She wonders how they do not see the way her horn turns hungry, how they do not understand the violence of her tail lashing against her own legs. And when they lead her to the bowl of water and break the egg into it, when they smile and tell her ”go in peace now,” she wonders how they could be so foolish to believe it a good thing, their ritual that did not work.

She does not smile at them. She does not hear their whispers, or step away so that the next might be “cleansed”.

She only leans closer to the bowl of water, and stares, and stares, and stares —

@lucinda
"wilting // blooming"