“Phantom. Your heart must be a ghost."
Every night she had not been haunting in the wake of her sister’s hunt had brought her a dream.
 
Last night she had dreamed of the sea beneath the fat moon. The night before she had dreamed of wandering a root system, her hooves had carried her in pulse from tree, to moss, to worm twisting in between the two. Tonight, in the hour right before the settling of dawn, she had dreamed of monsters.
 
Danaë had dreamt that she was the monster and that another monster had run shoulder to shoulder with her. Their tines had towered above the boughs of ancient trees and gathered up moonlight like a net cast into a silver sea. Miles had trembled like ants beneath the reach of their paws and foxes as tucked their heads down at claw and tooth as if it had been crown instead of death. Their eyes, because she knew instinctively that the other monster saw through the same black eyes upon her head, had seen in between the cracks of realities that lay hidden from mortals where the trees grew so closely together that there was no telling pine from oak or birch from pine.
 
And when she woke and looked to the moon bare of a sickle of brightness, she has looked away and saw a crack of that same reality waiting between one spiral of her sister’s horn and the next. But when she blinked it was gone. She woke her sister with a kiss upon her horn, a press of her lips to the bone in just the right place so that vanished reality, for a moment, sat between her lips instead of horn.
 
“Isolt.” Her heart’s name is a prayer upon her lips, an echo of the moonlight caught on that dreamt silver sea. In the pause of it, in the tremble of it as the flowers on their mantle wilt as her sister awakens, Danaë shivers with every flower as the dream starts to wilt too.
 
But she holds on to it with her soul’s teeth, and she pulls hard enough that the memory of a reality caught in a horn moves too, and it does not wilt again when Isolt meets her gaze. “The forest is calling again.” She does not explain, knows she will not need to explain when Isolt feels the way her heart rattles like a cage in her chest. She knows Isolt will see every inch of her straining for the dark, moonlit woods the way she strains to grow a flower (just a single flower) in her father’s garden.
 
Tonight, she has promised that monster in her heart she will not fear it. And the monster howls in response and echoes that same mark of the beast through her throat when she lifts the sound of it to Isolt’s ear so that she might hear it too.


"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”

Every night there are monsters waiting for me in the shadows. I do not see them, blackness wrapped in a deeper blackness; but I can feel them. I can hear them whispering to me, calling me out to them, calling me beneath the surface of that too-black-mouth waiting to swallow me.

So I sink into it. I sink into the darkness, into the sound of their voices wrapped around me like a blanket, I sink into all those slices of almost-death waiting to devour me. I sink—

nto the belly of the darkness, where hunger grows black spires like the ribs of a church twisted around her. She cannot see in that darkness, where black is layered over black like the inside of a buried casket. Somewhere in that darkness there are shadow-wolves circling her, and bramblebears smiling with rooted teeth, and a great owl watching her with wisteria eyes when it clacks its beak and begins to screech. But she can hear them, all of them — she can feel their bones trembling like her own as they press closer, and closer, and closer.

She does not sleep like a princess should, or a unicorn, or a thing that has ever known softness.

Isolt sleeps like the dead.

And she does not dream in the way mortals should dream — but in memories. She dreams in the wolves’ impatience and the bramblebear’s hunger, in the infinite knowing of the still-screeching owl. When she lays down in the middle of them all and listens, there is something else moving in all that almost-blackness, something that does not feel like herself the way all her other dream-monsters do —

It is the touch of her sister that brings her awake like rising from the shadows and walking out of the nothingness of her own dreams (like she is walking instead, into Danaë’s.) And it is not the owl she hears screeching at her, but the soft breaths of her twin, with her heartbeat echoing in sparrow-quick beats inside of her own chest. Her body does not feel like her own, when she blinks the darkness from her gaze and presses her horn into her sister’s lips.

“What is it saying this time?” she has never been as good at understanding the sighs of the roots or the creaking of the branches over their heads. Isolt was always too busy hunting down the bones buried beneath the trees, the half-dead things haunting between them. When she presses her ear to Danaë’s throat she thinks, for a moment, that she might hear that song of the forest that lives in her twin and in her father. But louder than that, she hears —

the roar of a monster, crying out to her —

the song of death creeping up the edges of diseased leaves —

her sister’s heart, becoming less-sparrow and more an echo of that roar —

It makes her own heart race to catch the pace of it. So she swallows the darkness of her shadow-monsters and climbs to her feet, to strain at the true-monster hiding in the dark, moonlit forest with the same hunger of her sister. Only Isolt does not wait (she has never known how to) before sinking herself like an arrow into the shadows stretching between the trees. She presses her shoulder into Danaë’s like a tide of that black-sea sweeping her deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the darkness with her.

The forest opens up like a mouth before them, and as Isolt runs she imagines that each tree is a tooth rising sharp and hungry to nip at her. When a branch tangles in her mane she thinks it is the bitter forest trying to keep its hidden monster from her.

But she knows with all the knowing of the screeching owl from her dreams, it will not keep her at bay for long.

“Phantom. Your heart must be a ghost."
“We have been sleeping long enough.” The forest whispers through her throat. Birches echo in the hollows of her lungs. A monster snarls with a furious impatience through her jawline. The space between her eyes, when she blinks back the last dregs of a dreaming restlessness, sparks white as bone tossed into a dark forest. She sees every predator in the forest trapped in the space between their skin when she peers at their reflection in a mirror across the room.

There is no moment, at least not that she will ever recall, between the walls rising like bones around her and the forest taking its palace. All she will ever remember is the feeling of the dirt churning up like the sea beneath their hooves, the night billowing like a cloud around the feral lighting bolts of them, the trees moaning a welcome when the wind forces their backs to bend. There is only the forest, only the feel of her sister as their bodies dissolve into the darkness between root and bough, as they run.

And run. And run.

Monsters are still snarling in her throat and dragging their claws along her organs. Each is begging entrance as they clamour for her magic. And each begging roar sinks deeper, and deeper, as the darkness and vines coagulate around them as the forest gathers like a god around them.

She does not see a mouth as they plunge into the soul of the forest. Danaë sees only a horizon, a stretch of darker black that promises the rise (and ruin) of something long, long forgotten. The howl in her belly, and the snarl, turns to song and image.

A paw lands on the back of a rabbit and cracks it in two. An antler scrapes at the belly of a world until in the middle of a civilization a blackhole opens. In the sea a tide curls around a tail as if it’s stone instead of flesh. A tree bows not by the force of the wind but by the force of an exhale. Bones crack, crack, crack like thunder until she thinks that she is not running but becoming.

When she stops at the crest of the ravine she sees not a grave but a heart slumbering and a god dreaming. “Come.” Those beasts in her throat bellow the sound like a call-to-war. And it is not a unicorn, or a sister, that tucks her knees to her chest and leaps. It is the slumbering heart of a god that falls through the darkness like a star plummeting to earth. I

A wendigo looks back at the second chamber of it’s heart and beckons it to beat, and beat, and beat until the entire world shifts back into root, and color, and flavor.



"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”