Everything in the forest falls silent the moment it sees me.
Like birds that can sense when a storm is coming, so too do the trees know when a monster casts its shadow beside their’s. I can feel them whispering to each other, root to root and leaf to leaf.
I smile. And I think to myself, let them know that I am coming.
Every whispering branch and rustling leaf is holding its breath, while the forest sits in a darkness and blackness so thick she might reach out and cut through it with her horn. Somewhere there are bones, and blood, and animals hiding in their shallow graves (what is a den but a soon-to-be grave?) for the monsters to pass. And if it were any other night, Isolt would have gone looking for them.
If it were any other night she would be hunting, with only the sliver of a young moon to hang like a weight from her horn. She would be listening to the dead sob between the trees while she cuts away tree-limb after tree-limb with her blade and watches the wood cry in newly-budded leaves all around her. Over and over and over again until it becomes not spring in her forest, but the bare-branches and dead-hush of winter.
There are a thousand memories she could bleed from the forest without the moon to watch, of skeleton branches and golden saplings and monsters-that-were-made settling down to feast. And all it takes is one whisper of a new-spring coming awake for her to begin to wonder at all the ways in which she might bury it beneath rot and frost again. Wonder lives in her bloody gaze, a look that has never known how to be innocent, or soft, or holy.
But somewhere in the darkness lying ahead of her is her mother-unicorn, leaving a dead-path that calls her to come, come, come along.
Isolt is following a trail of rot so thin another unicorn (one without flowers wilting in her lungs and a horn that only sings when it is carving through bone) might never have noticed it. But Isolt has violence in her veins instead of moonlight, and a wolf pack yipping and slobbering in place of a heartbeat. So she turns into that trail, and leaves her risen things to crawl their own way free from their prisons. She follows it as it leaves the castle and weaves between the trees, holding her breath and her magic tightly as she stalks like a second shadow in Thana’s wake.
Like a lion cub learning to hunt by batting at its mother’s tail, so Isolt becomes a daughter-unicorn wrapped in almost-innocence. Shadows gather between the curls of her horn and in the gaunt hollows of her cheeks as she tucks her head and leads the way with that spiral of bone and blood. Mold glimmers dark and fermented against her lips.
All the while that death-knell trembles below her skin, begging to be set free. Still her blood and magic burn in her veins in a way that makes her want to scream, and sob, and sing into the darkness of decay pressing in around them.
And Isolt does not try to hide the ache of her teeth, of her hunger, as she trails after her mother-monster.
“Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
There is hunger ahead of her, caught in the jaw of her black magic, and behind her. She can feel each pound of it like a blade against her throat begging her to eat, and eat, and eat, until the world is nothing more than bones picked clean by the tip of her horn. It sings a song, that desperation of hunger, in the creak of forest pines in the wind. And each note, each bray of the coyote pack, quickens both her galloping stride and the current of the death rushing out from her shadows.
Tonight she does not try to collar it, or choke it, or beg it to be something less than monstrous. Tonight with her daughter running in her wake and Eligos at her shoulder she does nothing more but demand more, and more, and more, of both hunger and death.
Seeds have no place in the forest tonight-- no place at all in the hunt of monsters.
Thana smiles, as unicorns smile with both singing horn and teeth, as the double blood-trail cracks in half ahead of them. And she turns when the thunder of their hooves turns to silence as she demands her daughter pause with nothing more than a flick of her lion tail. “Do we follow the dying thing or the thing running to survive?” Her gaze blazes as she waits to see which path her daughter wants to follow. Because it will tell her what sort of unicorn she has made from the wreckage of black magic and life magic.
Eligos continues on with his nose buried in the rotten leaves of winter’s end. He follows one of the trails with his hunger that needs no pause in which to learn, and gather, and burn up.
Around them the forest remains quiet as a corpse in a mile of loam. All the birds hold their song. All the owls turn their heads into the bark. And all the wolves close their eyes and pray that the unicorns will run by and turn their violence to other bared throats and tender hearts.
Thana pays no head to the silent wolves, and owls, and creatures praying, as she waits for Isolt to take the hunt between her teeth and pull. And pull, and pull, and pull, until the entire world unravels by the force of her vicious hunger.
It is the right of unicorns to unravel that upon which they set their gaze.
I try to imagine what it feels like to be so close to death. Can they feel it in their lungs, their bones, their muscles that are so close to giving out? Can they feel me coming up behind them, one step away, reaching out to tap on their shoulder and whisper in their ear that I am here?
Or do they only continue to hope, foolishly, that tonight is not the night? But it is, it is, and soon they will hope no more.
The first time she had followed her mother-unicorn out of the castle, it had been a secret. When she was supposed to be sleeping with her horn locked tightly with Danaë’s, she had instead been creeping between the trees as silently as a half-born thing could manage, holding her breath for fear of being discovered. She had learned what it meant to be a unicorn by watching her mother, who never tried to hide her hunger, or her violence, or all the ways in which she was more monster than mortal. And like a good daughter, she had learned well.
She thinks now that Thana had known all along that she was there in the woods, following behind her.
And there is a moment in which she stops and remembers that for all the darkness pressing in around her, she does not know how to be alone. And somewhere outside this forest there is another unicorn sleeping in the moonlight, as soft as she is violent. Isolt hopes she is dreaming of the hunt, of this hunt, so that she does not have to run after dying things alone.
Isolt draws close to her mother's side, pressing her muzzle against the dark red of her flank. Her hunger only keens all the louder inside of her chest when she tells it to wait. A tremor races down her legs, begs them to run, and run, and ruin.
But she only presses her cheek tighter against her mother, and taps out a song of impatience on the spring loam, anything to dull the ache settling in her jaw.
“A wolf would follow the dying thing,” she says quietly, because it is the wolf’s nature to chase down the easier prey. But she knows Thana will hear what she does not say, not in words but in hunger, that we are not wolves. The forest feels as though it is waiting, as it all the forest-creatures prey and predator alike is waiting for the monster in the shadows to learn how deep her hunger runs. Isolt pauses only long enough to wonder which way her twin would turn — but Danaë is not here. Not tonight. And there is nothing stopping her from being every bit as monstrous as she wants to be.
And the truth of it is there in her eyes, when she swings her horn between the two paths and chooses the blood trail that goes on, and on, and on, because she knows she is the only thing that can make it stop. She and her mother-unicorn, only this time she is leading the way as she begins to run again, unable to tell her hunger to wait my longer.
Both trails lead to dying things. Only one of them does not know it yet.
“Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
Madness lives in the moonlit forest tonight, gathering like twilight darks in the tangles of their shadows over the loam. Thana can feel it in the wind against her cheek, a kiss of ghost petal, a memory of her daughter’s touch before she’s gone chasing after the trail of blood leading them onward to the utopia of monsters. Had she known how to feel pride it would have risen against the surface of her skin like a touch to the insides instead of the outsides. Part of her wants to say, we have never been wolves, but language of the mortals has no home in the moonlit forest.
It never has.
Tonight the language in the silver is one of hoof and leaf, hunger and a desperation to live, live, live. There is language in the trees, in the drops of blood falling from the stomach of the desperate thing when it patters like rain against the pine needles. A story hangs in tomes of formless script where their shadows twist in and out of the thicket like snakes instead of unicorns. Each page, each poem written on the skin of the earth where it has been peeled back, creates a new memory, a fond one, in the tangled novel of Thana.
Her steps quicken her story to an apex, her horn the spiral tangle in the dark between one page and the next. Already she has forgotten the trail of the dying thing. Only when Eligos shares the taste of liver, and marrow, and horn coated in moss, does she remember that there had been two trails instead of one. Each of her steps only carries her after her daughter. She moves quick enough to trail but not quick enough to surpass-- tonight is not for the old monsters, the old masters of the moonlit madness.
Tonight is for the creation of new-gods, new-monsters, unicorns anointed by the feel of ribcage across their brows instead of crows.
Ahead the creature stumbles, an elk large and fearful enough to cause them harm as it struggles for survival. Thana watches as his antlers slips through the forest easier than it should even when his hooves scrape and claw for purchase in the spring mud. He cannot run as a predator runs. Large and terrible prey is still prey.
All prey, even this old prey-god of the forest, is destined to die at predator teeth of either monsters or death.
And they, the bloody unicorns in their forest of madness, are both.
The sickness she smells in his blood will only spread, and devour the herd until they are all dead. It is better, she thinks, that this one, this sick one, dies. Thana lifts back her head and howls, like wolf baying at the last desperate flight of her meal. But she does not leap after the stumbling elk, but rather she lies in wait to watch her daughter discover the terrible glory of the moon against her cheek and the blood between her teeth.
I can taste it before I sink my teeth into it. The rot blossoming like flowers in its lungs, the sweetness of its blood as it thickens and slows.
I can taste it, and now that I have —
I never want to taste of anything else.
The hunt does not begin in full until Isolt leaves her mother’s side and learns what the desperation of a dying thing tastes like.
She can taste it in the air, the adrenaline and fear, the way its blood makes patterns on the ground that whisper of its fate. There is a part of her that wants to stop and drag her horn through it all, and paint the story in a language that is as wild as she is. She wants to savor the taste of the elk’s lifeblood on her tongue, to fill herself up on every drop of its dying breath until she is bloated with the memories of its life.
Maybe, if she was alone, she might have.
Maybe she would have followed it endlessly until it nearly choked to death on its own fear, and then granted it the peace she offered in the shape of a noose.
And maybe later she might go back to the trail of the second dying thing, and mourn that she had not been there to hold it as it died. And she would fill her belly with the taste of it, too, so that both the bull and the cow could curl up cheek to cheek in the belly of her. Maybe later —
Maybe, maybe, maybe —
Another night she might have done all those things. But tonight, oh tonight she is racing with all the monsters snarling in her blood, and she is listening to the whisper of rot and lichen blooming like flowers in her steps. And she has forgotten that she was ever a thing half-born, or a daughter who had wanted to learn by watching her mother-monster, or anything but a thing made to rend and ruin and consume.
Her steps come faster and faster as every inch of her magic and immortality beg her to be. She stretches out like just another hungry shadow in the forest, and every time it stumbles her leap brings her that much closer to its throat. The sickness running in its veins calls to her like honey, until her mouth is watering with the anticipation of it and her stomach growls with the waiting. Her heart is a roar in her ears and her magic a song in the marrow of her bones each time it nearly goes down.
And Isolt with her aching jaw and her singing horn and her waiting teeth does not know how to stop herself from lunging at its throat when it slides to a stop.
Until its antlered head swings around, and the cut of its tines brings her own blood forward to spatter against his own on the loamy forest floor.
And then, oh, then Isolt learns what rage truly feels like as it burns a hole in her chest.
“Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
Thana was not made to be a mother. In her bones there is no instinct but that to rend, and ruin, and break down the marrow of the world until there is nothing left but dust (and Ipomoea and sometimes her daughters). She does not feel concern when the stag turns with the frantic violence of hunted things in its gaze. The pride blooming sun, and star, hot does not flicker down into anything but a dim echo not of fear but of fury.
Her fury, her wrath, her instinct to rend and ruin, is not only for the stag and his desperate attack.
A true-made unicorn might have known better and Thana, who is true-made, feels that spark of rend, and ruin, and devour turn ember blue-red. It does not smolder in her chest but out of it when she lifts her head like the god of the mad forest to watch the stag cleave a line across her daughter’s cheek. The flat of her tail cracks against a pale dead-tree like a gong calling forth the eve of war.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Her tail sings the song of war far below Thana’s eyes that do not promise salvation or comfort for her daughter.
Isolt is not Ipomoea with flowers in his hair. She is not Ipomoea with wings fluttering like chains of hope at his ankles. Isolt is not a king on a throne of roses, and roots, and memories of a desert hidden in the deep of a garden.
Isolt is not Ipomoea and so Thana, terrible and made Thana, will not save her.
She watches the rage, the wrath, the dregs of her own rend and ruin, turn to more than embers in her daughter’s gaze. She watches the stag turn frantic and feral as a mortal caught in a rip-tide (and he doesn’t know that Isolt is his riptide yet, Thana can see the denial in the way he lowers his horns to attack again). She watches the silver dapple like the blood of the moon on the bare spots of the forest where it is still thick enough to reach. She watches an owl alight upon a branch with wonder at a feast a glimmer of diamond in his eyes.
She watches Isolt turn.
And she cracks her blade against the tree again as she watches a unicorn learn all the ways in which she will die or which she will consume, and rend, and ruin. Until, Thana thinks, there is only dust.
I hear it in the deep heart's core. That song that runs through the marrow of all living things, the notes of it struggling to beat still in the heart of this stag. I can hear it echoing in even my mother’s veins, too, when my head is snapped to the side and I see her standing in the shadows like the reaper deciding which of us she will take home today.
It should scare me that I wish she would take me.
There is a song in violence in which she is learning. A song that sinks down into the marrow of her when the creature’s antlers crack against her cheek, like she is a leech pulling it out through his blood and bone. She breathes it in and feels it writhing there in her lungs, the notes of life and death, the gong of war calling her to come forth, to come and learn how to turn every drop of her pain to rage.
So she comes. And in her bloody gaze that is swung to the side she sees her mother who has already learned the song. So she learns. She lets the notes of it fill her veins, to tangle leg-to-leg and horn-to-horn with the magic that festers in her heart. It drowns the parts of her that were born in violence.
And in the blood that drip, drip, drips down from the curl of her jaw and onto the forest floor, it boils.
There is a snarl already on her lips when she turns to face the elk again. And with the war-drum beat her mother is carving out for her from a tree (the notes of that violent song she wants to learn more than she wants to live), Isolt again lunges for the throat a thing that does not yet know it is dying. This time, the swing of her horn is faster than the swing of his antlers. And she does not miss.
As the blood cascades down her brow and fills every hollow, hungry curl of her horn, she thinks of it like an anointment. She has seen the priests of the court anoint each other in oils, mark their brows with marks of the sun, of life, of rebirth. She has heard the prayers they whispered over one another. Never has she thought them more false than she does today, with the true-life running in split rivers down her face and a living thing tearing itself into pieces on her horn. Isolt, young, made Isolt knows more of gods than the false priests of this world. She knows death (and the unicorns who wear it on their lips in place of a kiss) is the only god that should matter to a mortal.
And this is how she learns that she is not a thing made to be loved, but another thing made to rend, and ruin, and consume: in the way she grasps the bull elk’s antler (the same one that had carved a line into her cheek) between her teeth. And when she lays the blade of her tail at the base of it and even while he struggles and his dying sounds split the night apart, begins to saw. With each cut she makes she is counting. With each deepening cut she is draining the song from his marrow. With each drop of blood that wets her lips she is learning how to consume the notes of it.
The elk is still at last when she lifts her head and carries his bloody antler back to her mother-monster and drops it at her feet.
And as the blood — both her’s and the dead thing’s — drip from her brow, there is a part of her that is still searching, as she lifts her eyes to Thana’s.
“Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
If Thana has ever thought she felt pride before at the sight of her daughter, she was wrong. Whatever feeling she had felt then is nothing to the feeling blooming electric across her black, rotten soul. It feels like one of Ipomoea’s flowers reaching for the sun in the dead of winter, a spot of bloody color in the middle of a colorless tundra.
When Isolt runs the elk through Thana’s heart leaps in her chest in two different songs. She can feel the holy hallelujah of a unicorn as she learns just how her horn was made to work. And she can feel the death-knell of the elk as he falls to his knees. She can feel how his heart, how her heart, races faster than it ever has before. This is not the feral rush of a joyous heart, but one of something so much deeper that there is no word in the language of horses to understand it.
But unicorns know it, and can hear it, when they run their horns together like blades instead of crowns.
And she’s singing that word over and over again (in bellows and snarls) when her daughter carries the elk’s horn to her. Her heart is blooming like a garden with the feeling she has almost learned to name in language when she watches gore puddle in the hollow of Isolt’s eye. Thana’s touch, as she dips her lips into that blood and drags a line from Isolt’s horn to her lips, is the gentlest one she has given anyone outside Ipomoea. There is no religion in Thana’s touch, only arcane knowledge given to all things made instead of born.
She does not need to know if Isolt understands when she scrapes their horns together. Nothing made by Thana would not understand.
Her something-more-than-pride rises when she pulls away as Eligos joins them again with his lips bloody from the other elk. Tonight, in the mad moon forest, his eyes do not linger on Thana but on Isolt with her grotesque prize at their feet. He lifts his head up to howl loud enough that Thana’s ears ring with the sound. The note ends almost as soon as it starts and his eyes are more molten than gold when he looks at Isolt eye to eye.
When Eligos, the monster made from sand soaked in blood, bows at the feet of unicorns it is not Isolt that is he pledging loyalty to but her violence.
Thana does not pause long enough to smile at the bowing Eligos when she says, “and now you understand.” There is still no smile on her lips, only the wet shine of blood in the moonlight when she lifts her nose back towards home and Ipomoea.
And like before Thana does not look to see if Isolt follows as she lets her stride eat, and eat, and eat of the mad moonlit forest.
If I knew how to sing, it would be to the song of the mad forest tonight. If I knew how to dance, it would be over the body of a thing that-once-lived. If I knew how to write poetry I would carve stanzas of blood and gore from his still-warm body.
There is a moment in which her heart seems to hold its breath, when she first lets the weight of the antler fall to the loamy soil and lifts her ruby gaze to the amethysts of her mother-monster. She can feel her lungs trembling like dying leaves waiting for winter to tear them loose. The wolf-pack and murder-birds in her bones fall silent.
And with a patience she did not know she possessed, she waits.
Until Eligos tempers his snarl at their feet, and Thana drags a bloody line from horn to jaw with her lips. Until that song of violence comes rushing to fill her veins, echoing in her jaw without the feel of the antlers to grind her teeth against. Isolt does not smile, but the feral joy is there in the way her eyes turn brighter, and in the wildcat that sighs and licks its teeth in her belly.
There is no religion in the blood dripping down her cheek, but if there was it would be the closest thing to a baptism that she would understand. In its place there is something more, something that is more arcane, and more primal. There is the glory of a unicorn learning her place in this world (and it is between the heartbeats of a dying thing and its final breath.)
She stares into Eligos’ golden eyes and blinks once. Only once. Like a monster welcoming another monster home.
“Now I understand.”
The words are a poor replacement for the feeling that is racing through her veins. But she echoes them like a daughter that is learning how to be like her mother. And with only one last look over her shoulder at the elk’s carcass (a mournful look, for she wants to lay down and feast, and feast, and gorge herself on the last of his life that is still draining from him), she turns into the gloaming darkness after the first unicorn. But before she follows her, the blade of her tail hooks around the antler she had carved from the dying elk and drags it along behind her.
Later she will show it to her sister — and with it she will teach her to rend, and ruin, and consume in the way of the unicorns.
