[P] as you float, float, float

[Isolt]

& wait for something to root
to rot or blossom
or die without sunlight

There is another unicorn staring at me in the water. The water has turned my features dark, my eyes to moonlight; the ripples have made the sharp edges of my face soft. This other-unicorn has dreams beneath her skin, I can see them. This other-unicorn belongs here in this world where I do not.

I do not think I recognize her. But I think — I think I wish I did.

---

Isolt knows that she is a monster.

She can see the truth of it reflected in the eyes of every horse she meets, the way they see her not as a person, but as a thing that is other, a thing to be feared. She can see it in the way the streets clear when she walks down it side-by-side with her sister, their ribcages locked together like a secret between them. And when the forest falls silent around her, all the rabbits and squirrels and woodland birds hiding in their dens and nests from the wolf that waits at their door.

She can see it now, as she looks down into the waters of the lake and sees not herself, but someone that is other.

Unicorns should not want to become something else, she knows, she knows — but still when she looks down at the reflection that does not feel like her own, she feels the bits of root and weeds wrapped around her heart tremble like caterpillars waiting to transform. And she thinks of her sister, with her wisteria lungs and poppy heart, and the sorrow she has seen reflected in her eyes. She had wondered once how she couldn’t turn her sorrow to daggers the way Isolt has turned her pain to a wrath by which to consume the world with.

But now, she thinks she understands. Now she can feel that nameless wrath slipping out of place to show the scars that still lay beneath it.

Around her the pond grass and river reeds are curling, their flowers collapsing into a fine dust that spins in circles across the water. Isolt watches them bend down into the water, bowing their heads against the surface like they, too, were surprised by their reflection.

She wonders if they, too, want to become.

Unicorns should not be waiting for metamorphosis. But as she leans closer to the water she holds her breath anyway.

Isolt dips the tip of her horn against the glassy surface of the water and draws lines through her reflection. She stirs the bits of pollen and rotting leaves into the waves to watch them sink.

And when she sits back and waits for the ripples to settle, as rivulets of water spiraling down the curls of her horn and drip down her brow, she hopes a new reflection will form.

"Speaking."

@e-cho for whoever!

Isolt.

☙

[Moira]

tagged
@Isolt

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upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty.

Pull apart the threads and you'll find veins beneath her skin. Living. Breathing. Burning. A conflagration of creation that echoes and copies and leads the humming in her own body just as it is a mirror to Isolt's.

And ancestors they are beautiful.
And ancestors they are tragic.

Their blood singes the very skin that holds it in place, sewing them into beings made more of stitches and dreams and half-lies and half-shadows and not quite people than anything else.

If Isolt is still waiting to transform, then Moira is always in the midst of that metamorphosis. A phoenix always sheds old feathers when they grow too warm, too long, too worn. They always wear a new skin eventually. She will always be burning even when she simmers in place and the coals of her last death are still bright and ready to forge something, someone, anew.

Now, she feels that itch that comes when everything is calm. It pulls back the sinews connecting muscle to muscle. It itches along her tendons carefully curved along the ends and edges and ridges of bone.

Moira is restless in the worst way possible. And how terrible it is to feel that itch when she knows she should be happy. She should be comfortable. She should be bright and burning and a beacon and involved.

But she is here instead, head dipping to the surface of the water as the pond-flowers dip in answer to Isolt’s incessant pull. She drags them under as some kelpie, but she is nothing like those wide-mouthed creatures that are always hungry.

Even before she makes her way to the edge of the water that holds Isolt’s rippling reflection, the phoenix knows that this girl, barely reaching into womanhood, still fresh and hungry and green, is different than Denocte. Moira Tonnerre’s Denocte is smoke and shadow and dreams. It is a court that holds the future in its eye, that holds each other much more closely, that loves and breathes and grows and grows and does not stop for anything.

Hers is a court flourishing.
Hers is a court alive.

This girl that grapples with death and tames it is not of her court. Dripping red horn spirals to the sky, but it is the color of her, the build of her, that reminds the pegasus of someone else entirely, perhaps. Ipomoea. The thought filters softly through her mind, and were it dusk and were she not so feminine, perhaps the unicorn could have been mistaken for her father.

It is  not dusk. She is not the sovereign of Dawn. “Hello,” the phoenix says instead, remembering another day at this lake when she was the girl in the water and Raum was the man on the edge staring at her.

How time has come full circle, how her life has changed so much since her first days in Denocte.

And she itches still as she did then.
Yearning.
Hungering.

New.

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