The way grief needs oxygen.
The way every once in a while,
it catches the light and starts smoking.
I could not stay away from the island. And I didn’t want to, not even after last time. It captivated me, as all wild things did. So when the seasons changed and the snow began to fall and whispers began to spread like wildfire through the court, I knew it was time to return. I had to see the landscape of stars-turned-glass for myself, and seek whatever answers (or what mysteries) might be found in the island’s new form.
We turned West, my wolf and I, and we began to walk through the slowly-falling snow.
My first thought upon seeing the island reborn was that it was beautiful. But it was always beautiful, in some way or another. That day it was beautiful in a way that suggested dark secrets hidden just beneath the soil. Some wickedness or sacrifice, some terrible price paid for the pristine beauty of all that wondrous glass.
I became uncomfortable when I walked deeper into the island’s embrace and was met with visions of myself. I didn’t much like my reflection-- I could never match the girl in the mirror with myself, and I hated that she is what everyone else saw. In short, I did not identify with my reflection, and so it was deeply unnerving to look at myself.
The reflections on the island were easier to handle because they weren’t all me. I mean, it was my reflection but… always a little older, always a little different. Some versions of me were crying, some were laughing. Some just stared, dead-eyed, lost in a sorrow so deep they were no longer present. In some I held a bow, others an axe or a paintbrush or herbs. Sometimes I was a dancer, draped in sheer white silk, diamonds woven in my long mane. Furfur was always present in some form another, and as I started to suspect the reflections were all different branches from the tree that was my life, I took great comfort in his presence, dark-eyed and wary and the only constant in a sea of change.
I stepped forward, the ocean-weathered glass under my feet protesting with a crunch, and somehow I found myself before a massive mirror. My reflection in it was familiar. It was just me, as I was in that moment, surrounded by a hundred different versions of myself. Suddenly a girl stepped forward in the glass. Red as blood, white as bone.
As I looked upon the glass my face grew older. At first it was exhilarating to see my foal-softness melt into something harder, fiercer. My cheekbones grew sharp as knives and my eyes deep and knowing as rivers. Even my horn grew longer in slow spirals, a corkscrew digging ever deeper into the sky. Then my edges began to soften once more. Wrinkles creased around my eyes, my back began to bow with the weight of years, and the color slowly faded from my mane.
All this time the girl in the mirror watched me unchanging. As my gaze met her in the glass she tilted her head, and at the same time there was a subtle movement of red in my periphery. Behind me. I processed this all with a speed that seemed like honey dripping (in reality it must have only a second or two) then whirled around with a startled shriek, head lowered to point my twisted horn to hers. A unicorn’s greeting.
A unicorn’s warning.
I relaxed slightly a moment later, seeing she was not about to attack. “Gods, you startled me.” I shook my head with a laugh, feeling foolish. I once would have used the word scared, but I didn’t feel fear much anymore. Still I was still on edge, defensive. “Did you… see?” I gestured at the mirror, where my body was now slumped on the ground, wheatgrass and sunflowers sprouting through my ribcage. It was... personal.
I hoped she hadn't seen.
The way my grief will die with me.
The way it will cleave and grow
like antlers.
A S P A R A
@Isolt (@Danaë welcome too! totally up to nes/sid <3 I didn't write her in but you can just have her pop up at spook aspara)
I like the way winter sounds. Hollow, like all the life has been bled from the world, and left only the bones behind. I know spring is coming, but not before the grave fills.
If only winter was as endless as death, as I am.
The island feels as though it were made for them.
Or maybe they were made for the island, with their horns to shatter the dead-star mirrors and their tails to carve figurines from the pieces of glass left behind. There is no wind to make music through her horn here but oh, Isolt can hear it still. She tilts her head to listen to it, taps the flat of her tail blade along the glass-grass to its rhythm. She can feel the memory of it in her veins, tangled around that wolf-song beating alongside her sister’s heart.
And that monster inside of her begins to hum, as she steps over the broken pieces of an old world torn apart.
She walks through the skeleton of another world and never stops to wonder what it might have looked like before (and oh, it doesn’t matter). She sees only the beauty of the island as it is now, of the hollow shell of a land gone cold and lifeless. In every veil of frost she traces broken patterns with her tail, the only flowers she has not managed to kill. There is no life in them for her to take. And as snow limns her eyelashes like frozen tears and turns the world into one endless expanse of bone, she can hear the music over the aching.
There are no bodies in the ground whispering to her here. There is only the violence of a magic as wild and feral as herself, where the only gods exist in their spiraled horns and eyes that cry tears of blood instead of water.
She does not look at her reflection as she walks through the crystal maze with her twin, but if she did —
oh, if she did, she would see only a hundred pairs of monsters (always, they are in a pair) with the same cherry-red eyes promising violence, and bits of blood splashed across their bone-white skin. She might see them smile when she does, or hear their laughter echoing her’s when she finds one of those dead-stars lying in her path and begins to carve pieces from it.
She’s still watching the glass shatter as it hits the ground when she sees the other reflection. The not-monster, the unicorn who does not carry her horn like a sword by which to flay the world. She does not move as she moves, as a predator, as a god trapped in something else’s body —
Maybe that is why Isolt presses her teeth into her sister’s shoulder, and points after the other unicorn with that spiral of blood-colored bone. She does not try to be anyone other than the wicked thing carving the heart from world when she turns to follow after her. The crunch of her hooves in the snow (like breaking bones), the whisper of her blade across the crust (like the sigh of something dying), the way her eyes turn to blood instead of rubies, it all speaks to what she is even before the bits of mold turn the corners of the mirror black.
Her own face appears in the mirror behind her, sharp and bleeding. She watches as her reflection smiles, with teeth that are too sharp to be her’s (but oh, she wishes they were.) And as the color fades from that other-unicorn, her eyes only grow all the more red, all the more bloody, like a leech grown fat and greedy.
And only when the girl whirls around to face her and twists her horn to her’s, only then does she smile. Isolt steps closer, lays her horn against the other with a softness that does not match the furious beat of her heart. Like a kiss of violence, she pulls away.
“Yes.” There is winter in her voice, the crack of a snow-laden branch falling in the forest. She follows her horn with her eyes, watching as the wheatgrass and flowers begin to grow at last — her sister is still nearby, still watching, still waiting. The mirror seems more like a prophecy then, and everything in her is begging at once to fulfill it.
But she only bites down on her tongue and swallows, and fills the hunger with her own blood. When she speaks again, slower than a living thing should, the words sound like teeth gnawing at a bone. “Which do you think is better?”
And her horn swings like a noose between the crumpled body laying at the floor of the mirror, and back to the unicorn’s still-beating heart.
widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
I
solt, which each perfect steps she takes in the dead world, is making music. It is the song of the aftermath of war. There are notes of loss in the chime of bone on glass. Hope, broken and dead, hangs on the echo of hoof and star and shadow. Each sound, each ring, each clamor of bone and glass, is lovelier than the last.
Her sister, her unicorn, her soul, makes music that turns into biblical sonnets that only she would be able to make.
Isolt makes music. Danaë dances as she follows the directions of the notes and the bellowing demands of the thunder left in the wake of them. Each of her steps is light as a fox hunting a hare as it outruns the hounds of hunters. Her horn is the spiraling red-light of the north-star as it clings to that bloody hour between dawn and darkness. The bones in her legs are nothing more than roots by which a petals blooms. She is the paper on which the notes makes themselves immortal.
Danaë is, as she dances to the music she cannot make, the garden that she'll never be able to grow. But the knowing does not make her steps any less sweet, or the bitterness in her bloody eyes less fermented. The tragic certainty of it only makes her smile in the graveyard of stars, like it's a garden she's running through instead of broken and shattered fire-bones.
And she feels the teeth, like the bone keys of the piano in the entryway, pressing against her shoulder before she knows to look at anything but the dark sky. She wonders, before she turns, what steps she is supposed to take to this note of flesh and bone and bone. Is she to dance, or stumble, or stutter through the notes of her own song she does not know how to sing?
Is she to carve the music into the star-bones? Is she to shatter?
Is she---
The unicorn, the dead one with her pale hair and her sunflower bones, sends her thoughts tumbling like stones. Dead things do not belong to the sunflowers and the wheatgrass, she thinks with a kiss to her sister's cheek, they belong to us.
All the dead unicorns belong to them as much as the foxes, the hares, and the wolves too. A rose blooms out of the glass-star-bones as she pushes closer to the unicorn who does not know that she belongs to the dirt and not the mirrors. How does she not know? and with the thought the dancer drapes her throat across the maker-of-the-graveyard-music.
She smiles in the same way she does as she paints bloody kisses across the bone brows and the daisy eyes. “I would have given you dahlias and lavender.” And she when blinks, long and slow as a dying thing, the look in her eyes is full of music and blood-red magic.
The way grief needs oxygen.
The way every once in a while,
it catches the light and starts smoking.
I turned and stood before the girls who knew the secrets of becoming and unbecoming.
They were so beautiful.
One of them reached forward to tap her horn against mine, light as a kiss. I felt seen. Although I did not think I was afraid, a chill ran across my spine as though my body sensed I should be. At my side Furfur was still and silent as stone, regarding them in his quiet way. Even in placidity, every part of him suggested not just the speed and ease of collapsing into violence, but the thrill of it. He was unconcerned.
“I couldn’t choose. We’re the same.” Not just me and my dead body- all of the visions. All of us, every version of me reflected in the smooth crystals. I recognized there was nothing between us but a string of choices, conscious or not, some so seemingly insignificant I wouldn’t think twice about them. Dead me, alive me. There was no better or worse... I was and would always be just a series of actions.
I didn’t like her horn pointed at my heart. It was so rude. I lowered my own to meet it, and I guided it aside- back to the mirror, or up to the sky. Anywhere but at me. The grooves of our horns entwined like cogs of a gear. It felt somehow like another invasion of privacy, and I drew back as soon as my point was made. The grating feel of her would linger for a long time, corkscrewing down my horn and into the center of my forehead.
“And you?” It was only fair, I reasoned, that if she asked the question, I could too. I knew full well that life did not operate on fairness, not in any sense of the word- but I did, or tried my best to. I think you had to define what you thought was right, and then you had to stand behind it. Or else you would be as directionless as the wind, eddied in all the cracks and hollows of the world.
(Also I dreamed of being full of righteous anger, all tooth and horn and brimstone, fierce as Isra-- but first, I thought, I needed to understand righteousness.)
My wolf was growing restless. All this death hanging low in the air, all this tiresome mortality. His eyes sharpened as he looked from one twin to another, coming to rest on the one that spoke “I would have given you dahlias and lavender.” He seemed to be slowly growing larger.
I wanted to step back and tell her that she didn’t know me, but maybe she did. I had met strangers that were easy to read as a book, their entire lives written in the lines of their face and the shifting depths of their eyes. Maybe I was that open, that simple. Most of the time I felt like a buffoon. And I did love lavender.
“Why?” I asked. I wanted to form my voice into a fist. To punch the words like a challenge. But plain-faced curiosity softened my edges, unrolled the curled fist into an open palm. What did it matter which flowers grew from my skeleton? In the end, it didn’t mean a thing at all.
The way my grief will die with me.
The way it will cleave and grow
like antlers.
My sister is dancing, dancing, dancing, and there is not a soul dead or alive that could convince me that any part of it is wrong. In all the ways that I am hollow and dead, she is full, full, and perfect —
and when our flowers are gilded in rot and weeping pollen instead of petals, I would not have it any other way.
Isolt can feel her heart making music inside of her chest, music enough for her sister to dance to. Even when they come upon that other-unicorn with the wheatgrass and sunflowers making poetry of her mirror-corpse, even then her heartbeat is a symphony only two things-that-were-made would understand the notes of.
It feels right, then, that that silver unicorn should look so much like a dove watching as two snarling wolves come her way, and not understand that she was to be their meal.
It is why she smiles, all teeth and bone. And in that world where stars are skeletons of dreams and unicorns are monsters born of flesh, Isolt can smell the sunflowers and wheatgrass of summer beginning to wilt and ferment. The dying does not go gently, or quickly, or quietly. It goes one petal at a time, sloughing off like dandelion wishes in the wind (only these ones carry dreams of mortality in every drop of their decay, instead of wishes.) There is no grass to wither and die at her hooves here, but oh, even the death of the reflection fills her up and sits like a weight at the bottom of her hunger.
There is a part of her that thinks the scene playing out in the mirror is a revelation. And the magic in her blood is whispering to her of a thousand ways she could recreate the death of innocence here in this world, of how she could carve art from this other-unicorn’s body the way she carved the dead-star.
Maybe it is a good thing, then, that their horns should press together not a moment too soon, before Isolt has a chance to drive the point of bone through flesh and learn how deep her hunger truly goes. Before she has a chance to tell her no, that the difference between the living and the dead lay in the killing, or to whisper the ways she could show her.
Instead there is only the feel of bone against bone, midnight skies on fermented wine (or is it the other way around?), the impermanence of life on immortality. Every bit of her magic comes awake at the feel of it, burning like all those dead-stars come back to life inside of her veins. And there is a moment when Isolt presses back into her touch that it seems as though all the violent promises of winter are about to be fulfilled.
She steps back, and hides the way her skin is trembling by pressing it into her sister’s. “If you need to ask,” she says around the aching of her teeth, “then you will never know.” And when she shivers, it has nothing to do with the cold of winter —
and everything to do with hunger.
Her blade is still drawing music along the star skeleton ground as she turns and drapes her own throat across her sister who still dances even when they are both standing still. And as that question why — hangs in the air between them like a noose, she holds her breath and begins to count.
Isolt holds her breath like the waiting matters — and as her heart begins to race like it’s lost the pace of her sister’s and is trying desperately to catch it again.
widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
H
ad she known a single thing about religion, or trees made to never fall, or girls who wandered around pretending they were more than a shard of glass shattered from a mirror and cursed, she would have thought they sounded like this: three unicorns meeting in a graveyard.
Her soul and the marrow of her made bones whispers to her echoes of that same sound. The heart in her chest, with chambers that expand by breaths, stumbles to catch the whispers and turn them into something (into anything) that the unicorn can hold.
The thorns in her throat close like fists of magic around the whispers. They drag them down, down, down, into the place where the wolves, and lions, and snow-bears roam. It’s a place unicorns who grow flowers in eye-sockets and broken-ribs cannot follow.
But she tries, oh she tries, anyway.
And when her sister lays her skin back against her, a cliff to hold back the tide of salt and sorrow, the thorns in her throat rise again. She feels like a doll in a garden frozen but for the limbs twitching in the memory of summer. She feels like a thing waiting, with breaths stuttered out between thorns, for the touch of a horn to pull taunt the fragile strings of her waving aimlessly between spires of bones.
Danaë steps closer as elegantly as a clockwork monster with oil instead of blood. The look in her eyes answers the winter of the wolf with the winter of the doll grasping for summer. Her horn whispers against the glass as she drags the point of it across the images she barely tries to hold (she’s too busy with her breaths to fret over the future). “Sunflowers belong to mares not unicorns.” When she blinks, and taps her horn to the pale bone crown upon the other girl’s brow, the shine of her eyes is as bloody as a new-furled dahlia.
This time when she blinks it is dahlia, dahlia, dahlia, instead of look. “Someday we will show you why.” Her smile, pale as a lavender stalk crusted in dawn dew, is that of the doll on the eve of summer. And her limbs, long and terrible, do more than twitch when she lays her shoulder to the glass and blooms dahlias from the fermented bones of the cosmos.
The way grief needs oxygen.
The way every once in a while,
it catches the light and starts smoking.
“If you need to ask, then you’ll never know,” she said with a shiver. I snorted wearily. I did not like when others spoke in riddles and ambiguity. I personally always tried to be myself without mystery, plain and simple; it seemed a vanity to pretend to be anything more. That is not to say the unicorn spoke with any sense of vanity-- quite the opposite. She had the easy way of being my father did, wearing the world on his shoulders like a weight long accustomed to, yet the intensity of my mother who had no reservations in making the world bend to her.
When I glanced behind the twins, I saw my reflection in half a dozen mirrors leaned in to watch the scene unfold. My expression in each was different: one me was wary, one wide-eyed in awe. One had her horn lowered as though ready to leap through the glass and pierce through the heart of the nearest girl. I saw I was sometimes a weapon, sometimes a target, always me. Always me.
I had never liked dahlias. They were too perfect, too symmetrical. They seemed to me unnatural, although- of course- they were anything but. And as the dahlias unfurled in perfect little whirls, their perfect patterns deepening and thickening, I felt something unraveling in me that did not want to be unravelled. It felt a little like a dream in which the earth crumbles away beneath you, and there is nothing you can do but fall.
I’m quite sure I did not like these girls and the way they spoke like they knew something I did not. And yet, as someone who knew in her heart there was always much to learn, I was drawn to them. I wanted to know what they knew. I wanted to move through the world as they did, like it belonged to me. Like I had power, power that extended beyond talking to poor things who had no one else to listen to-- which most of the time did not feel like a power at all.
I wanted to be a unicorn, and not a mare. I wanted to be worth perfect dahlias and sleep-smelling lavender.
But sunflowers were beautiful too, and wheat humble but noble in its own way.
The way they leaned against each other made me ache for my sister the way I always do when I’m without her. And for a moment I thought cruelly what these sisters might be like if one was taken from the other. Would they be shattered the way I would if my sister was gone, truly gone? Or would they proceed with the ease of wild seeds who know the only way is forward and up?
“Someday we will show you why.”
There was tension in my wolf. Although we were not quite touching I could feel it in my mind, electric. He was ready to spring, to shed his fur and become wraith. not now, I pressed into the clay that bound us, like a hand on the back of his neck, not yet. He huffed, wordless.
“I look forward to it,” my mouth formed a grin that was not a grin. It was a challenge, perhaps reckless- but what other way was there to be? I was young, and I felt keenly the weight of all my years before me. I could afford recklessness, even before these not-girls who walked with all the confidence of Death himself. “What are your names?” So I know what to call you, when we meet again. I blinked, calm and serene as still water.
And if my heart was racing, I was very careful that it would not show on my face.
The way my grief will die with me.
The way it will cleave and grow
like antlers.
There are times where I wish to be as soft as my sister, growing roses from corpses instead of being the one to make the dead thing by which she can turn into a garden. There are days where I hang my head around her shoulders and think I can feel the echo of her somewhere in my tendons, if I could only pull the song out of its hiding place in my marrow.
Somedays that wish is the only thing that stops me from tearing the heart from another unicorn’s chest.
In each perfect dahlia that blooms at her sister’s touch there is a whisper of violence. Isolt can see it there buried between the layers of petals, as it blooms from fermented bones and dead stars and lost wishes, like a speck of rot for her to grow into an army. She is watching it, searching for it, as flower after flower after flower raises itself like Lazarus against the mirrors.
And she is following her sister (always she would follow her, like a snake eating its own tail, or death chasing after life chasing after death) when she moves to press her shoulder like a kiss to the skeleton mirror. She is following her because she is afraid that if she doesn’t, she might be lost from her, never to find her way back, never to curb the sickness rising in her throat like a plague for her to infect the world with.
She is following her even when she knows that it will cause the death of more than one of her perfect flowers.
And oh! how that magic of her’s reaches now like a thing that has been starved for so long, too long, long enough for its hunger to turn to rage. It races like spiders down her sister’s neck and falls upon the mirror like a wave ready to tear it down, drowning her all the way down.
Not these, she whispers to that black pit frothing in her chest, not her. And she begs her magic to reach for something — anything — other than the flower shivering on the winter bones. She begs her magic to dull its teeth against her own ribs, to eat away at whatever softness was left in her own lungs before it turned itself on her sister’s creations.
And she knows it is working by the way her heart trembles and hardens. When she rolls her eye back in its socket to look at that other-unicorn it is there in the look of agony making her jaw clench tighter, and tighter, and tighter.
“We are,” the darkness in the mirrors, the sound of shattering bones in the distance, the roar of a beast deep in the ocean. She can feel the saliva coating her teeth when she lifts her chin from her sister’s back and stares the other-unicorn down with her bloody gaze. “Isolt.” And she knows her sister will finish the rest for her when she stops to swallow down the drool.
widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
C
arrying all the things, all the ghosts, that live in a unicorn is still a skill she’s trying to learn. In each dahlia that blooms there is an echo of it in the dark spaces between the petals. All the roots, as they rise like weeds from the dead stars, have bits of rotten wishes held between them. Danaë, when she titles her head to wonder at the roots, sees herself reflected back in the pieces of caught glass-bones.
Each piece seems to her a ghost of everything she’s trying so hard to carry. She can see her horn that looks exactly like Isolt’s. The curl of her neck, where it hangs just below an unfurling bloom, looks like the other unicorn’s (beauty with a suggestion of violence where it forgets to be soft and gentled by mane). Even her eyes look like one of her father’s eyes looking back at her when she turns to watch the expression in her gaze as she watches her garden grow, and grow, and grow, until the graveyard and the mirror are living things. And she wonders which shard of glimmering bone caught in the roots shows a single part of her that is just her and her alone.
If there is one there she does not see it or bother to look for it when Isolt and the wolf turn the air electric with a need she knows better than she knows the song of her heart.
Her tail angles towards the wolf, a warning her body makes without her permission. The instinct to kill is there. It is buried deep down below her hunger for life and beauty, but it is there nevertheless. Beneath the electricity in the air, that feeling of doom and ruination, it takes longer than it should to realize the silence has been broken.
She’s about to answer in the exact moment Isolt does and she turns away from the ghosts of other souls (where there should have been only pieces of her) to watch the wrath and hunger consume her sister. The air is more than electric now, it is weighted like there are stones in the air instead of fog. She moves to press her cheek to her sisters as she says, “and Danaë,” as if Isolt had not stumbled down into some instinct deeper than the center of the graveyard.
Beneath her touch, when she presses her lips to the corner of Isolt’s, she can feel her trying to swallow the hunger back down. It feels as natural as breathing to push their hips back together when she turns once more to consider the unicorn and her wolf. “Who are you?” She asks. Because it had not escaped her notice, even in the stone-filled air, that the unicorn asked but did not offer.
Isolt, if she cannot settle down her hunger, should at least have a name by which to hunt, and Danaë should know who it is she’ll grow flowers for.
The way grief needs oxygen.
The way every once in a while,
it catches the light and starts smoking.
When I was younger, long before that day on the island, I did not understand the difference between pride and vanity. I strove to have neither, to be blank as freshly fallen snow... I was, of course, a fool. I could keep vanity at bay, but pride found me. Pride finds everyone, in the end, but it loves unicorns the most.
The mirror, heavy with flowers, groaned like a waking thing. Cracks fanned across its surface like spiderwebs.
Perhaps I was too proud to be afraid. It is the pitfall of pride, and the reason I so resisted it. When the pale one- Danae- angled her tail like a reaper at my wolf, I raised my brow and swept my horn from sister to sister like a pendulum, or a blade deciding from which river to wet its tongue. “I am Aspara.”
Roots sought out the cracks, forcing them wider, bringing the mirror crumbling to the ground piece by piece.
I could often be slow, thoughtful, deliberate; but I never lingered unless I wanted to linger. And I sure as shit did not want to linger there. “Well... I’m gonna go now. See you around!” My voice was bright, carefree, but there was a knowing steel in my smile. A promise, and beneath it the vague outline of a threat- as one unicorn to another. Until next time.
I turned and left with a swish of the tail in goodbye. Furfur lingered a moment longer, watchful (don’t think I would have turned my back on those girls for a second without him there) and turned to follow me a few seconds later.
Together we disappeared silently into the maze of mirrors, brushing our noses from time to time against the cold glass. And although we moved with all appearances of quiet confidence, we were listening carefully for any sign of a unicorn, or two, at our backs.
The way my grief will die with me.
The way it will cleave and grow
like antlers.
The island feels as though it were made for them.
