widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
T
his earth, here in the desert beneath the winter-night, is bitter. It is bitter and brittle with all the dead bodies in the sand-monster dens, the flower seeds dropped by the migrating birds that could not root and the grains of sand that whisper the stories of the bones like diamond tuning forks so faint and frail that only a unicorn can hear them.
The song of the bitter earth, as it bellows and echoes like thunder in her heart, is deafening. If her heart had any notes of its own, or her liver any sorrow of its own, or her belly any hunger that foliage could quell, she would still only hear that song.
Like thunder.
She walks on her frail legs that are no less full of decay than the dunes. Her eyes look at the moon in the way the coyotes once did. The wind rustles through her mane, and whistles through her horn, as it did to the feathers of the hawks and the eagles who can only dream of flight now. The black shadow, stretching thin in the moonlight behind her, shifts across the sand as a winter elk's once did when he strayed from the heard.
The unicorn walks and she is all the pieces of dead caught in the ocean-deep sand.
Even the music, when she slips in through the shadows in the garden, does nothing to dull the thundering roar. It only settles below the death-knell like a lone flute in a sonnet of drums. The faintness of it, the frailness that makes her think of the dunes in the moonlight, makes her treasure it more. She follows it, as the coyotes followed the lone winter elk, with hunger gnawing at her belly.
But even when she lays her cheek against the marble, close enough that she can see the sweat gathering around the musician's eyes, it does not fill her.
Nothing does. Like the dead, and the thunder, and the dreams she is never full.
There were none then who could destroy either your head or your lyre,
Even as those furious ones raved and tore;
And all the sharp stones which they threw at your heart
Turned to softness upon your breast and, behold, were blessed with Hearing.
Vercingtorix is here because Adonai asked him to be. And so he haunts the city of a man he once killed, marvelling at the intricacies his own decisions wrought—
He is here, in Solterra, with the desert in his lungs because he chased after the rumour of the condemned surviving, and others shores to conquor—
No, he hears Damascus’s voice intercedes.
You are here because when you condemned them, you condemned yourself.
Of course the dragon would remind Vercingtorix of the actualities of his fantasies; of course he would destroy the nuance.
Do I need to remind you
the serpentine voice hisses in his own mind, that when you Bound Orestes’s Soul, you shattered your own?
He can see Damascus’s opal eyes in his mind.
Do I need to remind you, that I am a piece of that broken soul given voice, and body, and fury?
Leave, leave, leave.
But broken things—
they come back to what broke them. And so even as Vercingtorix drifts through the party—even as he admires Adonai through the garden foliage, or the marble statues—he feels the oppressive weight of his bonded, reminding him—
Vercingtorix is here because he broke something irrevocably and, in doing so, that thing owns him. His mouth is dry. The music is too loud—too abrasive. Do they not know, there is no music where he from?
Only the sea, shushing into the night and the day and every time in-between, into every hour and every minute.
It would be more bearable if he were speaking with Adonai now, he thinks.
It would be more bearable if he did not stand there with the motion of the party a blur around him.
Vercingtorix drifts toward the musician with something like disdain in his heart. His own lack of belonging splinters him—everything is foreign, everything is strange, and the idea of a celebration in and of itself…
Well, he had only tasted celebrations after a severe victory. And this was not that.
He might not have seen her as she laid against the marble if it were not for the fact her appearance evoked a certain, instinctual reaction. How she lay, the stillness of her body—all of it reminded him of a corpse. Vercingtorix glanced at her a second time.
The broken, Damascus hisses.
Find the broken. Vercingtorix hesitates—and then he begins to walk toward her. But when he stands beside her, and besides the musician, he has nothing to say except,
“What does it sound like, to you?”
Oh you lost god! You unending trail!
Only because hatred at last tore asunder and dispersed you
Are we now the hearers and a mouth to Nature.
ooc: I wanted this to be Aeneas but he isn't made yet I'm sorry
Something in the desert is familiar, even when it should not. I think it is the way the sand is like me, how it strangles the life out of every flower, every tree, every blade of grass that dares grow. And yet that unnamed thing run deeper than that, feels like something reaching past my ribs to a part of me I did not know existed —
And it pares my soul to the bone.
Isolt does not know why she followed her sister to the desert, when she could have (should have) walked beside her instead. Or why her heart settles into a death-tremor rhythm as she does, with each step feeling more and more like she was on a hunt for the one thing she knows she would never kill. But as the world turns from white to gold and still the trail of hoof prints leads on, she begins to wonder.
Isolt does not know —
But she wishes she did.
When she walks through the opened gates to the party, she thinks only how strange it is that so many horses should be pressed so closely together when beyond the city there is only space to be filled. And she thinks it stranger still that they should move in patterns her feet do not know how to make, guided by music she does not know how to listen to. While they twirl and laugh around her she is still — and only her heart quickens inside of her chest, starting its fever-beat anew. And when another horse bumps into her, laughing, head turning to apologize — every bit of laughter dies in his throat when he sees the look in her eyes.
She watches him go, and cannot help the way her tailblade seems to whine as it scores the air. Every moment she spends here has her feeling more like a creature and less like a person, a thing rather than a she. Maybe it has always been this way; maybe it is only the differences between dawn and day that has her realizing how much she does not belong in this world.
As the other stumbles away, she sees her. And every aching part of her wants to growl, and howl, and make all the noises of a pack of wolves at the end of their hunt. But she does none of those things when she walks up behind the sand-colored stallion; she only twists her horn until it quivers an inch from his skin. And before she speaks, she has to first choke down the snarl that is rising in her throat to make way for the words. “You should not tempt death so.”
And again she wonders why she wants so badly to drive the tip of her horn past his skin, down to the bone — when all he did was dare to stand too close to another unicorn.
widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
T
he coyotes are telling her that this is the way of the hunt, a lone broken one to lure the foxes and the vultures in. This is the cruelty of the world, the cycle of the snake eating its own tail, the brutality of being a thing made of weaponry and magic. Still her heart trembles in her chest, a sparrow's death knell, a bell-chime of an eulogy. Her magic, her hunger, her form, all shiver as a lightning shivers when she turns away from the music.
Her fevered skin misses the coolness of the stone immediately. It misses the silence of death when music filled it in the cracks not yet fat with blood.
“The music does not sound like any one thing.” The tilt of her head as she considers the scars painting maps on his skin (ones she was made to read) is more wolf and elk than unicorn. The flare of her nostrils and the lick of her lips as she tastes him is almost profane on the sweet expression of a girl trying not to be the monster her blood is telling her to be.
There, just below his throat, see the thrum of his heart. The space between the first and second rib is the most fragile, the quickest entry point by which to unmake him. Twist your horn as a fox twists a hare's neck when it sinks into his skin. Go for the hollow just above his eyes to show him how the see the universe beyond this one. Kill him.
“It is too many different notes woven together to sound like anything but life.” This is the way, the coyotes say again, of the hunt. She steps close enough to see the many shades of pink making up his scars. “Can you hear it?” And on the wake of the asking she wonders if she should touch him below his eye or between the first and the second rib. She wonders if it would be called a kiss or a war, a caress or a wound.
She wonders and--
Isolt comes to them then and the coyotes in her bones set to yipping and howling at the violence in her eyes that promises a banquet to come. Her mouth waters and her jaw sets to aching with the need to gnash her teeth like whetstones and steel. Everything in her, every coyote and stag and sand monster, bellows for her to join her sister and hunt as predator packs hunt.
Everything in her screams to devour, and taste, and grow a garden from the gore left in the wake of them.
When she swallows down the salivating wild-dogs and sighs “sister”, like a prayer instead of the name mine, she has to close her eyes against all the rage rising in blooms of pink against the belly of her bone-white skin.
And still the music goes on. Like life it goes on always hungry, always beautiful, and heavy with the bitter-sweetness of brutality.
in the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he is
and life is only a borrowing of bones.
✧
T
he party already feels disjointed; nearly drunken. Perhaps it is the music, or the thunder of voices, or the dancing of the flashy patrons. I cannot decide why when I glance at the young unicorn, there is at first one, and then the rising voice of another.
You should not tempt death so.
If only death and killing were so poetic. If only it were so easy as slipping a blade or horn gently through flesh and bone. Sometimes, it is. Sometimes, it slices the same way music does through the air—the music does not sound like any one thing—sometimes, it is as simple as breath tiredly leaving the lungs, a hat hung up at the door, a goodbye without words.
Sometimes.
But not usually.
Death is blood that pools, congeals. Death is screams that rattle in blood-soaked lungs. Death is the glamour of the battlefield; but mostly it is the silence that lasts so long after. It is ravens at the corpse of those you once loved.
It is not unicorn girls marked with the color of wine, despite the way they make my skin crawl.
It is too many different notes woven together to sound like anything but life. Can you hear it?
She is too young to to be saying something so profound; but the depth in her is the same depth I have seen in the haunted trees, the trees that have bore witness to the suffering of men. I do not trust her uncanny eyes; and I trust her sister’s even less, when she arrives with her comment whetted like a blade against stone.
They do not frighten me.
They do not frighten me, because death is not a ghostly child in the life I have lived.
And so I answer: “No. I can’t.”
It does not sound like life, to me, but pandemonium. Even chaos has always had some semblance of order, some rising discordant symphony. It sounds like too many things rising for attention, clamoring for it, screaming for it. The violin shrieks. The flute screams.
I nearly turn away then, less interested in them together than the first had intrigued me. Instead, I glance at the wine-red girl, her voice having been a snarl, her horn still held so close to my skin. I drop my head and spin on a heel, letting one of my onyx horns tap, tap, tap against her spiraled one. It says what I do not.
I dream in tomes of rot and hunger, of a world where the dead command the living to lie down in the graves. I dream of men who carry their eyes on strings around their necks, and weep tears of blood from empty sockets.
Men like him, who did not listen when I whispered to them like religion, bow or be broken.
After today, there will be always be a song running in my dreams where before there was silence. And that song sounds like —
Isolt does not know how to listen to the music. While others dance to the violins and the lutes and the harps, her horn sings only of battle-songs and blood-lust and bloody ghosts trembling in her marrow. It does nothing to drown out the thunder of her heart, of all her broken pieces whittling themselves into blades that point now at his heart.
She can see it now, the truth of this man who stands like a weapon held out in an offering of violence between the two of them. His scars are written in a language she understands, that language of monsters and mortals, hunters and prey, things to be consumed and those who consume them. He is the blade others have formed him into, but she is as much as she is made.
A soldier is a dog, trained to come when they are called, to bay after the fox running through the thickets. But Isolt is a wolf. And wolves do not know how to be anything but what their instincts tell them to be.
This is why the wolf leads the husky out into the darkness beyond the fire, where the pack is waiting, hungry and drooling. This —
ah! This is what she was made for.
All the monsters her father warned her about are living inside of her chest tonight. Each time they snarl and lay their teeth against the bones of her ribs she snarls, too, and feels their rage echoing in her rage. She closes her eyes and sees them, flashing teeth ripping apart bodies, maggots crawling through the spaces their fangs rent.
She does not ask her sister to open her eyes and watch, watch as she unmakes a man who knows nothing of unicorns and how easy it is to die at their horns. There is no time to whisper to her that the feast is coming, that this is only the first soul she will give her tonight. There is no time for anything but a smile, before the feel of his horn tap, tap, tapping against her own sparks against her volatile hunger.
Like an ember tossed on a pyre she explodes.
She watches the color of blood reflecting back to her on one of his onyx horns when she blinks at it. The hungry, hollow curl of her horn catches on his like it has only ever been a track for her to follow. And then down it travels along the smooth line of blackened bone, all grace and fury, red gleaming against black like blood splattered over armor. Down, down, down, teeth bared and begging for flesh, and blood, and bone.
And when she twists, she aims to slip like a knife straight into his eye.
Just like that, the music stops. And all its songs turn to screams in the throats of the not-unicorns that look on like sheep knowing their time is coming.
But she can hear it still, in the music her horn makes sliding down his, in the way the wind whistles down the hollow spine of it. And this time it sounds only like her heart beating out a promise to a stallion that knows nothing of wanting.
And when her eyes turn from ruby-red to blood-red, the desperation of them says I will, I will, I will, and then —
widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
T
he first note of the eulogy of wolves goes just like this: a flash of fang, a drop of spit that falls like a fat tear onto the torn open heart of a fawn, a snarl that is trying to be a kiss between tear and vein, a sickle moon curling scythe hollow over the sonnet. That first note rises as the moon does, in an arc of silver between the graveyard veil of clouds dark and ominous as the look in her sister’s eyes.
But the second note of the eulogy of wolves goes like this: a whisper of the rest of the pack moving over frail winter leaves bared by the melting snow, a clack of brittle nail against whetstone, an ominous hush broken only by a hundred gurling growls of stomachs empty and aching with the same hollowness as that sickle moon.
And the second note ends with--
Silence.
There is nothing after the second note.
Danaë can feel it rising, the first note and the second and the silence, as night does in the sunpale lining of her skin. It blossoms and unfurls as roses in tomes of hunger heavy upon her tongue. Each scream of a violin and each brass warcry of a drum only sets her teeth to dripping tears and her lips aching to be set into the sickle curve of a snarl.
A wyrm swims across the sand in her belly and a neurbian etches maps into the tender lining of her liver. A pack of wolves beds down in the forest thicket of her nerves and veins. A unicorn blinks her eyes at the song of horns as it cleaves open a silence that only the eulogy of wolves might fill. Danaë, pale as her sister is bloody, blinks before she lets the song weld each ore porous edge of her into steel.
No, he says.
All she hears is please.
So she becomes. Oh she becomes. In each tome of song and drop of spit pooling into an ocean behind her snarl she becomes. She becomes the devourer of men, of innocence, of the music that shatters into screams and panic. Like a rose becomes a thing embedded into flesh-- she becomes.
And what is left in the wreckage of the clash of horns is the thing that comes after the second note: silence.
Her hooves are as silent as the pack’s paws over the rotten leaves. Her shadow is just as dark as her sister’s cloud swallowing the moon. Her horn is a gurgling thing upon her head and it is braying, braying, braying for anything to fill it to wholeness. And her blade, her sickle blade, makes less than the sound of a nail against a whetstone as it rises to lay just below the tender curl of his mortal throat.
Every pack-- the wolves and lions and jackals-- in her belly starts to sing the second note of their own eulogy.
widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
A
wolfpack does not linger at the belly of their kill to howl at the moon. Their hunger makes of them a satiated and lazy thing when all their violence has been spent and poured into the earth like water. Their second song, the second sonnet of a eulogy, settles easily into silence when their eyes turn to butterflies instead of moon-shards trapped in a skull.
Danaë settles with them as their violence drowns every ounce of fearlessness from the music. She had tasted the weight of it in the air, grown fat with it, fluttered her eyes until they were butterflies instead of blood moon-shards. A spore turns to blossom in her chest and the lions take their claws from the flesh of her liver. The wolves tuck down into the chambers of her heart as if it is not life but a cave buried in the middle of the forest.
Her blade does not need to drink.
Tonight.
But tomorrow, as she taps it against her sister’s hip, they will run and run through the dunes until every monster buried in the sand feels the endlessness of her sister’s hunger in their dreams. Tomorrow they will not listen to music cut out like a gut in the moonlight but sand-storms, and whispers of hawks crying in the distant canyons.
Tomorrow it will not be in the world of mortal men that they linger but in the cradles of gods.
And next time, there will be no tomorrow to stave them off and no music for their violence to feast upon. Next time there will only be unicorns and all the things that are not.
Her steps, as she walks towards the desert lit only by the gathering of moonlight of her skin, will not be the lingering echo of the gutted music. Tomorrow, and all the days after that, will hear only a roar from dull thud of her hooves when she walks until limestone becomes sand.
{ closing up some of her lingering threads "speaks" notes: <3
Only the feel of my sister's blade tap, tap, tapping out a song against my hip can silence the snarl rising in my throat. Only the flowers she blooms in place of violence can make me lift my horn from the throat of a man I want to kill. The promise I see there in her eyes is the only thing that has ever convinced me to be soft when all the world is making me sharp, sharp, sharp.
There is blood dripping from her horn to her brow.
She can feel it pooling there above her eye, a reminder of the eye she nearly took from him. It limns her eyelashes like red mascara, curls down the corner of her eye in the tract of a bloody tear. When she blinks, she sees red —
When she blinks, she sees the gore of a man who knows nothing of the hunger or the sorrow of unicorns, running in rivers across the stone floor —
When she blinks, Isolt sees the marrow of this world, she sees soldiers piled at the edges of a battlefield in place of the party goers. She sees the blood glimmering against their skulls, the arrows pierced into their sides, their empty eyes staring through her. Somewhere the first crow is gorging itself on those very eyes, plucking them out to make room for the daisies to grow in their place. And a unicorn walks through them with a smile curling like a scythe across her lips.
Isolt turns to follow her sister into the desert, and she does not see those mortals watching her like dogs watching two wolves walk amongst them (a god does not worry itself over the concerns of the sinners of its world.) She sees only the graveyard they would fill, only the bodies after the war. And to each of them she whispers like the true-god of death calling to its army of the dead, come.
She curls her tail around her sister's like a knot, tucks her shoulder to her hip. And with that pollen spore blooming in their chests, and all the coyotes in her heart slaking their thirst on stallion’s blood still dripping from her horn, she follows Danaë into that promise of tomorrow.
Isolt does not know how to listen to the music. While others dance to the violins and the lutes and the harps, her horn sings only of battle-songs and blood-lust and bloody ghosts trembling in her marrow. It does nothing to drown out the thunder of her heart, of all her broken pieces whittling themselves into blades that point now at his heart. 