There is another unicorn staring at me in the mirrors. She is white as sun-bleached bones, moonlight spun into a body. Her horn is as straight as mine is crooked, solid as mine is hollow, soft as mine is sharp.
She is as lovely as I am terrible.
And I want to kill her for it.
Isolt taps her horn against the crystal mirror just to watch it break. A fracture spiderwebs across its surface in arcane patterns, cracking the image of the unicorn looking mournfully out from it. As the sound of shattering glass fills the air, Isolt wonders if she feels dead yet.
Another tap against the glass with her horn, and the fractures spread further. Another, and the unicorn trapped in the star-skeleton starts to cry. Her tears are quicksilver bright, falling in rivulets down her cheeks. And in all the places where the cuts spread across her skin, she bleeds silver blood. It leaks out from the mirror, coating her horn in unicorn blood.
A final tap and the crystal shatters into a thousand thousand pieces, and that other unicorn shatters with it. Isolt laughs, and her laughter twines like music through the star’s and the unicorn’s deaths. Her perfect teeth, her moonlit horn, her unscarred, unbloodied, unbroken skin — all of it lies now as dust at her feet.
It has always been the most beautiful things that made her feel all the more monstrous.
She turns away from the broken mirror, her eyes burning to see all the other star-skeletons staring back at her with watching eyes. There, a fox, with daisies blooming and wilting in his empty eyes. And here a lion, with rotten teeth dropping like tears at his feet. A wolf, a fairy, a wendigo, a shadow — all of them watching her. A snarl rises in her throat, rattling like thunder in her lungs and oh, how her flower-printed bones leap at the thrill of it.
There are no more unicorns watching her now.
Her walk turns to a trot, then a run, then a gallop in which she stretches out long and low and loses herself in the furious beat of her hooves cracking the crystal ground with every step. She turns into madness streaking through the graveyard of stars, a blur of color tearing apart a colorless island. Even when it seems she has been running forever, when it becomes a wonder she has not run into the ocean, still the echo of madness burning in her veins urges her on. She runs until her lungs tremble and wilt, and her heart flutters like a dying thing taking its last breath.
It is the endlessness of it that makes her stop, with the sound of her blood singing rising above the crystal shattering beneath her hooves. And when she turns to the next mirror that rises tall and pale before her, she does not see the other horse standing in front of it, not at first.
She sees only the eyes of the unicorn staring out at her, with skin as red as blood.
And it steals every thought, carves away every bit of hunger and loneliness from her heart.
A hundred constellations, each full of a hundred stars, are dead below the breadth of her wings. All their bones are glimmering in the low-light of the nearly black moon. Warset can see, in that gloaming light, all the echoes of the wishes gone stone cold in their diamond bellies. And each of those wishes, looks like a scar (like a million scars) drawing her a map to some place she’s been starving to reach.
She flies, and flies, and flies.
The sky above her head has turned dark with midnight but here her body, her curse, has no noose-right grasp on the hour. Here the sun does not turn her to a girl and the moon does not turn her to a predator. Here is almost, almost, another broken mirror image of all the things she used to be.
Where her reflection catches in the mirror dragons curl around feathers and moons. When her silver eyes shine against the glass arrows, pillars of galaxy-smoke, and arrows, and harpsichords swing in the shine like weapons wielded instead of lost. And when the shadow of her wings, and the moonlight ray of her eyes, catch on the unicorn running she only sees blood enough to drown an entire mortal world.
Like she had once followed the clarion call of war through the deep space Warset angles her wings to follow the galloping unicorn.
Her heart thunders to the sound of hooves cracking open all the bellies of her sisters. The never-ending ache in her heart blooms into a wound as she slows to look at all the stones of wishes laid bare that the unicorn had not noticed. Warset can see a wish of love, of wealth, and one for a happiness she has never been able to understand. Each wish, she thinks, belongs to a mortal.
No immortal thing, no star, no universe would wish for so frail and fragile a thing.
Warset is still thinking of wishes when the unicorn stops at the base of a universe-corpse and she lands upon the wide top of it to peer downward at her (and she does not know how like a blackbird singing to a monster she seems). Briefly her eyes flicker to the holographic image of her caught and reflected between the mirrors and she wonders at the frailty of that pegasus standing on the bellies of her sisters.
“Why did you stop?” The blackbird sings to the bloody unicorn, but she is not foolish enough to curl her wings back to her sides as she leans over the edge. The are too many dead wishes in the unicorn’s wake for her to forget the nature of galloping and bloody things.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
When I walk between the star-skeletons, I cannot remember what living stars look like. And I do not care. They are better this way — dead things freed of the hopes and expectations they did not ask to carry. They are dead. They are free in their death. They are better now.
Isolt does not stop to wonder what broken wishes lie in pieces behind her. And she does not pause to consider who those wishes belonged to, or what they did when they realized all their hopes would never come true. She is not a fallen star to care for the bodies of her siblings, and the hopes and dreams of mortals do not wrap around her heart like the noose of her sister’s.
And when she looks into the mirror of a dead-star, she is not thinking of what it used to be.
It whispers to her (as all dead things whisper to her.) If she could Isolt would turn every star on the island to a risen thing, with moonlight-vines weaving their broken pieces back together and dahlias taking the places of all the wishes that had chained them down. She would turn them all into an army marching across that glass bridge to lay unwanted wishes on the backs of mortals, to carve lines into their skin with their hopes the way they had carved lines across the faces of the stars.
But when she presses her lips against the dead-star-mirror, it only trembles. And it sighs. And it slumbers in its death-sleep.
And the red-eyed unicorn watches her.
She shifts her blood-red gaze up, up to look at the blackbird with silver eyes peering down at her. And if it were not for the unicorn in the mirror (that her that is other in a way she aches to be), she might have felt then like a lion waiting for the sparrow to come within her reach.
But instead she only looks up and thinks how much the girl looks like another broken and dying wish hanging over the earth, as if at any moment she might collapse and be another star-mirror casting her reflection.
“To listen—“ she licks her teeth (her teeth that feel too sharp and not sharp enough at the same time.) “Do you hear them?"
When she tilts her head back at her, she does not need to hear her answer to know it.
Warset remembers what had lain in the center of the primordial darkness like a dark sun too furious to hold any color. She remembers the feel of it when her wings had brushed against it on the way to the battlefield. Each time she had wandered to close to the hot molten rage of it, both the absence of everything and the presence of everything, she had felt like a suggestion of a star instead of the soul of one.
It had felt a little like looking at a bloody unicorn who is both the absence and presence of everything. And Warset wonders if the unicorn can feel the echo of something primordial looking out through her eyes when silver and blood-red meet.
She wonders if she can feel it like Warset feels the heartbeats of a mortal, a star, and a predator all beating to different songs in her chest.
“If they are speaking it is not the language of stars,” her voice is a hum and the universe-corpse beneath her hooves trebles, “not anymore.” A feather falls from her wings as they dance as her side to remain balanced as more and more dead stars vibrate with the echo of her song (a song that they cannot recall with dead-wishes in their dead-bellies). Her eyes cast reflections against the mirror at the unicorn’s back and from it another harpsichord swings like a guillotine untethered. Warset does not let it hold her gaze long enough to see the head that has appeared beneath the blade.
She is broken enough already.
All the stars have settled and her hum has almost faded into silence by the time she lights up the tip of the unicorn’s horn with starlight. “What is it that you hear, unicorn?” And had she remembered the name of the thing that lived in the center of the primordial darkness like a sun-- had she remembered she would not have called the creature looking up a unicorn.
Another feather falls from her wings towards the unicorn as if her wings remember that dark primordial sun too, as if they miss it.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
The other-unicorn in the mirror is still watching me. I tell myself it does not matter what she thinks, or says, or dreams; I tell myself it does not matter that she looks at me like she is ashamed to wear my skin. I tell myself it does not matter, but like a star carrying somebody else’s wish, I know it does.
If the dead-stars are telling her of all the wishes they once held, it is only to show her the way the burden of them cracked their spines and sent them crashing down here to this island.
Isolt thinks that if she were a star, she would have been too wild of one to be wished upon. She thinks she would have burned too fiercely for that, that even the mortals would not have dared try to chain her with their own hopes and dreams. She wonders how these stars could have been foolish enough to let it happen, so that all they felt when they crashed into the sea was the sorrow of a thousand wishes that would never come true.
She thinks they are more beautiful now, with all of them stripped away like flesh from a bone.
“No,” she sighs, “it is the language of the dead.” And she can hear them — she alone. Even the pegasus with her star-light eyes and a hundred constellations beneath her wings cannot hear the echoes of a thousand dead wishes caught like pearls between the ribs of the stars.
Always, she is alone with the dead.
If her sister were here she might have wondered what a star looks like held together with ivy and chrysanthemums. She might have leaned in and whispered for them to rise, and become, and to consume dreams instead of bear them.
But Danaë is not here. And so it is that Isolt steps forward and lays her cheek against the star-mirror, and wraps her tail around the bones of it scattered at their feet. “I hear screaming.” A feather that is blacker than the night falls and lays itself against her spine. “And crying.” There the feather grays, and droops, and becomes dust pooling against her heart. “And things reliving their death over, and over, and over again.” She does not try to save them from it, the same way she does not try to save the feather that dared touch her.
“Do you know what it feels like to die, pegasus?” she lifts her eyes back to the blackbird-pegasus perched atop the mirror, and again thinks it is better that she does not come down to find out.
