There is blood still dripping down my shoulder from the claws of the island-throne. And there is still the dull ache of fire along my cheek, where the girl had burned me. It aches, and aches, and aches, and I—

I do not know how to live without it.

t is a long walk back from the island, and Isolt makes it alone.

It feels wrong, to not have her twin pressed into her side. It feels wrong, to not share her agony (and her rage, and her sorrow, and her confusion at being a thing made instead of born) with the other half of her soul. It feels wrong, for each step to ache and to not have the softness of her sister’s skin to distract her from it.

Each step only aches all the more because of the absence. And each time she grits her teeth she thinks only feels that bit of rage coiled in her chest grow, and grow, and grow.

There is still blood crusted along her jaw (her blood, from eating her own heart in the throne room; and the island’s blood, from tearing apart its limbs that had been wrapped like a cage around the throne.) Isolt did not wash it off in the star-blood river, did not slake her thirst the way all the other horses who had come to marvel at the island’s wonders had. Isolt had known better than them that it was not water the island offered to the thirsty. And she was too much like Thana to take any offering an island of magic had to give, without taking it first between her teeth and tearing it apart.

She knows she should go home to her sister. She knows that when she curls up tangled leg-to-leg and horn-to-horn with Danaë that she will forget her rage, and her hunger, and her pain; that together they will raise dead things from the ground and run like rotten flowers through the forest with a bramblebear pressed against their sides. She knows, oh she knows that she is a terrible thing without her sister, the same way she knows that she is not so filled with sorrow to be like Danaë who wants to not be the monster the rest of the world sees them as.

And so there are no risen field-mice or sparrows fluttering in her wake like pages torn free of a book. There are no flowers blooming in their empty eyes or vines holding their broken pieces together. When the dead in the earth cry out to her she does not try to save them, or fix them, or give them back the lives that were stolen from them. She does not help them.

Instead there is a garden of rot blooming beneath her hooves, a trail of black racing out behind her like a cloak. Flowers lose their heads to the blade of her tail, crumbling into ash and dust in her shadow. Blades of grass wilt and crumble. Herbs turn bitter and poisonous and this, this Isolt drinks down like a wolf who does not know how to pull back her jaws from the kill.

It makes her a terrible thing, she knows. It makes her more and more like the monster the world sees her as. But still (but still) when she sees the other horse standing amongst the flowers, she does not turn away and try to hide the terrible parts of herself.

She only steps closer, and closer, and closer.

And when at last she stands before the smaller, antlered girl, she does not speak. She only reaches forward with the blade of her tail, and carves another head from the stalk of a wildflower.

In its place a cardinal flower blooms, bloody and toxic, watered by her own blood.