solt waits in the shadow of a wall overgrow with wisteria, watching the flowers deepen into ever-darker shades of violet.

On the other side there is a ballroom, and in that ballroom are horses dancing like they are shards of moonlight caught in the wind instead of mortals. When she tilts her head she can hear the ghost-music whispering in the throats of a thousand white sparrows beating their wings in the rafters.

Her heart feels like a note of that song they are weaving, splintered off and forgotten behind when the rest of the instruments lift into the crescendo. And perhaps she is beginning to learn how her sister feels, how sorrow lays down to root like a rose in her liver, thorns tearing apart her insides. Perhaps now Isolt is learning she always knew how to be soft, and only now does she find it in herself to want to be.

She should be inside, she knows. She should be following along in her sister’s shadow like a sword ready to carve through the hearts of anyone who dared dance too near to her. She knows she should be trying to get to her hunger, and her rage, and the pieces of herself that fit into her sister’s sorrow like a key to a lock. She should press their horns together and whisper to her of all the ways the world will bow at her feet (of all the ways she will make sure of it, because Danaë is the one thing in this world that she would do anything for.)

There are a million things she should do as a sister, a twin, a unicorn who is only half of her own soul.

Instead she blinks, and watches the first petal free itself from the wisteria wall with a sigh. It falls like a black tear to her feet (and she knows it is the only tear she will cry, in the only way she knows how to.)

When she pulls away it feels like she is cutting arcane patterns into her heart with the blade of her own tail, like she is carving away the bits of sorrow that are trying to grow in the loam of her. Her heart flutters at the taste of it, at the way the rot blooming in flower-patterns down her throat is not enough (is never enough) to sate the hunger coiled in her belly. The hunger only licks its teeth and growls, and begs her to reach for more and more of the petals (and more and more and more—) until all the wall comes crashing down.

She almost does. Isolt almost presses her horn to the wall like a spear thrust into the belly of a boar, just to see the way the petals would bleed black and heavy down her brow.

But tonight she is more sorrow than rage, and not even a belly-full of wisteria can stop the aching that runs deep enough to devour her whole.

So she blinks, and another black-petal-tear falls. And she tilts her head back to listen to the music that is bleeding through the walls like ghost notes.