I wonder how I can always feel like this -- like I am one mouthful away from starving, one breath away from drowning, one step away from tumbling from the end of the earth. I wonder if it ever stops, this aching, this anger that makes me want to tear the world open root by root, tendon by tendon.
But then again, I don't know what I would be without it. And I don't think I want to know.
Sometimes, she likes to come to the edge of the forest and pretend she is standing on the edge of another world. From the shelter of the trees she watches the snow sparkle in the sunlight, broken up only by the snowshoe hares and winter foxes flashing quick as teeth in the open.
She watches now, as one rabbit leaps a second too late for the safety of its den.
And as the fox trots triumphantly through the snow, prize firmly caught in its jaws, the wind sings a warning down the spiral of her horn. You would be next, it promises with each step the fox takes that she is not following in pursuit. And when she grows bored of watching it live without fear, Isolt turns and drags her horn down the nearest tree until the bark cries and bleeds sap. The fox breaks out into a long-strided lope that carries it swiftly out of range, and another part of her heart feels like it is falling like a rotten leaf from a vine to watch as it does.
Maybe that is why she steps out from between the trees for the first time. Why her hooves cut through the unmarred snow like a knife, and all she thinks is how lovely it sounds to hear the ice crust shatter. The cold presses in against her skin and she welcomes it like the grim reaper welcomes the dying home.
She might have lain down and pretended to be dead then, entombed in an icy grave, if she hadn’t seen the other unicorn first.
Isolt points at it with her horn, lets that hollow bit of blood bone lead the way as she cuts across the prairie. Her war-drum heart races along faster than life inside of her chest, screams at a pitch that does not match the steady way she marches through the snow. A part of her hopes she looks like death coming to greet the other unicorn, hopes the girl will shiver and turn to run like the fox at the sight of her (so that she could chase her and make up for all the other things she should have followed to the grave.)
But instead they meet like shy wolves studying each other across the snow, circling like two things that have only ever known how to take and consume, to be the predator and never the prey. And Isolt aches to reach out and carve lines into her pale skin.
She feels more like a god than a unicorn when she lifts her head and studies her. Because she smells like the sea, like rotten, saltwater-sodden wood floating in the ocean, like flotsam caught in the tides. And even without having seen the sea before, Isolt knows it smells something like death.
“I think you should be dead.” Her voice waivers in the sunlight, like she wants nothing more than to turn back to the darkness of her forest (and to drag Avesta back there with her.)
She wants to ask her when she died, how she died, why she died, but more than that —
Isolt wants to ask her why she didn’t stay dead.
But instead she is silent, and only her eyes speak all the accusations her heart is singing like a whetstone to a blade.
A hundred different stories have told me about the sound of winter, how it's silent in a blanket of snow and blinding beneath the sunlight. And perhaps this is the first time, on the shoreline of peace instead of war, that I see the world for the bloated thing of liars that it is.
There are a million different sounds in the winter: snow falling on snow, ice crawling across the surface like roots, sunlight melting the snow in way that nothing alive can see. Perhaps to something else, something alive, it might seem like silence. But to me it seems only like the sound of cells, so loud that it is easier to call it silent instead of feeling like nothing more than another cell caught in a chamber of a heart. I do not mind the feeling of nothing.
Like a tiger with a belly full of blood, I languish in the silence bloated with sound and light refracted enough to be consuming. The snow looks like a sun beneath my hooves, another world in which there is only wolves, and unicorns, and predators with necks caught in their jaws. In that world I smile a look that unicorns and princesses should not know the shape of. And when I snarl it is just to fill silence with another heavy sound that the living will call nothing more than snow on snow, or ice on ice, or light on light.
Perhaps it's fitting then, that other unicorn that finds me in the winter quiet has wrath in the spiral of her horn and hunger in the corner of her eyes where another might hold a tear. The sight of her makes me smile with the echo of my aimless snarl still in the air between us like a broken bell-chime. I become not death tilting my eyes at a corpse but the bringer of it (the bearer of it as a sword is borne) watching the reaper hurry along in the wake of me. I know here is war in the curl of my neck as and in the angle of my horn as I tip it towards the point of the other unicorn's horn.
I am no shy wolf, no thing clinging to the shadows. I am as much as I am risen.
“Maybe I am dead and you have only forgotten how dead things should look.” My laughter rings in a way that seems more growl than amusement. Foras emerges from the shadows as nothing more than an winter wolf stained by the colors of the sea (or maybe it's the color of frostbite). His nose is colder than the air against my hock as he tucks his teeth away in the curtain of my tail because he is too hungry, too wanting, to hide his violence on his own.
When I step closer he follows, obedient as he had been on the killing-field (and just as full of rage as all dead-things are). “But perhaps, unicorn, you would like to tell me what else you think I should be.” And I wonder, as I keep my pointed teeth hidden in my pale lips, if she would taste like the forest in the winter or in the spring.
Is she root or rot, petal or vine?
Already I know, we know, that she will not taste like brine as I do.
There are bones to be found laying along its shore, when the oceans dry up and turn to deserts. I want to know what the sea looks like, when it’s broken apart and spilled like blood in a forest. I want to hear how loudly the sea-gods scream when the mangroves laugh and grow twisted and bloated on their salt tears.
All gods are jealous gods.
There is war in the other unicorn’s laughter, and a battlefield in the frozen space that separates them. In it she can feel the snow groaning, and cracking, and splitting apart like bones tossed in a fire. Dead things are turning over in their graves when she traces flower patterns overtop them with the blade of her tail.
And all the while Isolt is smiling, with all the teeth of a wolf chasing after a dragon shining bright and hungry in her mouth.
It is not a kind smile.
There is the thrill of the hunt crawling like disease down the hollow curls of her horn when she angles towards the girl who looks so much like a winter sea. And there is a long moment in which Isolt wonders if it is blood or saltwater filling her veins. The sleeping-meadow around them is quiet, so quiet — already she can hear the notes of a dead-sea-song rising like a wave between them, all its drowned voices singing beneath bracken tide pools.
She does not know the notes of that song. Her’s has always been of the forest, of unmarked graves and seed turning to rot and roots growing through empty joints like nooses dragging them down. But when she lifts her head and points her horn at the lonely winter sky (the unicorn’s only way of peace), she thinks —
“I do not forget.” Her blood is humming like a storm-cloud over the water, grown fat and heavy with brine. Lightning cracks sharp and bright behind her eyes. “I remember the face of every dead thing in my forest, and where to find them. I know their bones like my own.”
But they were all asleep now. And the unicorn’s blood felt very much alive, leaping along the curve of her jaw. Isolt licks her lips, swallows down the storm threatening to drown them both in fury.
And still, she can not stop the thunder from rolling through her belly like famine when she curls her tail towards the other girl’s legs. “But perhaps you could teach me what dead things below the sea look like.”
She thinks she could learn many songs, if she cut the notes of them free.
Isolt is not the reaper hurrying along after death. She is a goddess as much as she is a mortal, and she does not wait on anyone.
For a dead thing I feel so very, very alive. The snow beneath my hooves glimmers like my mother’s quartz and the dappled light feels like a story told by my father when I could not sleep in the belly of a ship (so far from the ocean and yet so close to it). There is both blood and sea-foam rushing in my veins that warms me as much as it cools the hurricane wrath I do not know how to stop feeling. Every inch of me, every feeling, every urge, makes my head swim with thoughts that always err on the side of terrible.
As I always am, I am glad that I am not a wall in which my sister might pull secrets. I would suffocate her with a weight heavier than stone.
“Don’t you?” Before I say the words I already know the answer. It’s there in her gaze-- that look of the crows and the vultures with eyes and pearls between their beaks in the aftermath of war. I wonder at the way she does not try to hide it. Her strangeness, her hunger, her unicorn morality (by which I mean none), is all there for me to read like a story.
But I tire of reading. I want to flip to the end of the tale.
My horn does not angle away as her own does. The curl of my smile turns as kind as a look full of sharp teeth can be. Parts of my jaw ache with the need to lay my body against the curl of her own. And when she angles her wicked tail my way I cannot help but laugh at the threat in the movement. I have stared down far sharper things.
Foras snaps at her tail in the lone warning that he gives to any creature (for she is a creature as a much as I). My laughter brightens into something terrible. “I cannot teach you what they look like.” I warn her as much as I warned any soldier on the warfield. From this angle I know our horns do not look very different from swords, and spears, and other things welded to maim and drink. And drink they always do…
“But I can show you.” And my own threat, my own rolling tide thunder, brings with a smile that is sharper than the last. For now I do not move closer, or lean my horn away from the crown of her own (I have no interest in the sky).
There is something about the sound of another unicorn’s heart beating along to the rhythm of death. And never is there a moment where I stop and think that it is wrong to want to kill another unicorn, or to pick my teeth clean on the tip of her horn (her horn, so much straighter than my own, like it doesn’t know how to be hollow with hunger.)
There is never I moment where I stop. Because death does not know how to wait.
It only takes hearing it once for Isolt to decide she hates the sound of laughter.
It makes her jaw begin its aching anew, as her teeth grind together like things reshaping themselves against a stone. She wonders how long it would take before they are as sharp as the other unicorn’s. She wonders if her smile could ever be as terrible (and as lovely) as a girl with a mouth like a shark’s.
And she wonders, oh she wonders if the blood would taste any sweeter than it already does in the mouth of a monster. Always she wonders.
The snap of the wolf’s teeth at her tail does not to stop her from reaching, and reaching, and reaching across the fragile space between them like a blade cutting through a screen. It does not stop when the girl’s laughter spills like blood from a slashed throat. It does not stop at the warning rolling like thunder across her storm-cloud skin, loud enough she can feel the echo of it in her bones. It only taps out its own warning on the ice that is beginning to look wrong, and empty, and dull without blood to gorge itself on.
It is still tapping when she steps forward and traces the light catching on every sharp line of the girl’s smile. And Isolt does not need to wonder anymore if they are aching like her own, or if her horn is any less a sword or a spear or a weapon made for carving out hearts and eating them.
She knows then that the stillness of the empty meadow is only a world feigning dead as it watches two unicorns with war drums for hearts. And if she was any less of a thing made in magic she might have turned then and gone back to her forest, and carved out the sap and frozen hearts of a dozen trees that would never again know the warmth of spring. If it were not for the brine in the girl’s veins calling out to the rot in her’s, she might have heard the forest weeping over the sound of her own hunger.
“There is only one way you could show me,” she promises, because there is only one way that matters and already she is imagining what her skull would look like at the bottom of the ocean, stripped of its flesh by predator fish, seaweed tangled around her horn.
And then, softer, “wouldn’t you like to go home?” as she reaches across the pretending-to-be-dead distance and traces the scales beneath her eyes with her blade.
Mother did not tell me about the hunger of unicorns in any of her stories. Each tale of a unicorn was filled only with dragons, and lilacs in a garden, and moons that shed bits of themselves and called the pieces stars. She told me a story once of a unicorn with a horn black as oil (darker even than mine). She told me of how that black-horned unicorn saved the city that shunned her only for the evil lingering in the look of her.
When I was a child I did not think to question her. As a child I had laid my ear to her belly, where I could hear the roar of the sea like mother was just a shell, and wondered how I could be as heroic as that unicorn in the story.
But I know better now and I think that this unicorn, with her sinister red eyes, knows better too. Mother was a hero as much as she was a monster. Mother gave birth to both. I am not the hero; I never was. This unicorn is no hero either. We are monsters.
And I smile at her monster’s smile with a reflection of that same endless, ancient hunger. Foras grows longer in the shoulder and hip as he turns himself into a brutal reflection of this unicorn and I. Together we step forward and I lean the flat of my cheek against the flat of her blade like she’s offered me a kiss instead of death. The teeth in my mouth ache and my jaw snaps as instinct begs me to swallow her up like the tide swallows up the shore. She would be the brightest thing in the sea, all bloody instead of pearl-pale.
“Of course I want to go home.” I know, as much as I know the sound of my own rage, what she is offering. How many times, in the belly of war, had I laid my point against a dying warrior and offered the same thing? But I think I like the way she offers, like each word might be a dandelion instead of a nightshade bloom.
I’m almost tempted to tell her yes, yes, yes, just to see how quick she can kill.
But I know that Foras, as he bares his teeth and snarls, is tired of the taunting games I play with fate. He is tired of watching me bleed, and cut, and sigh in pain instead of joy. With a look, a bellow of a look, he tells me in the language of wolves, not today.
Today I am kind enough to listen. It’s been so long since I have been and I have forgotten how it feels to obey. “Would you like to come with me?” And I wonder, as I watch the light dapple through her horn across her face, which question she is going to answer.
Everything in me is begging to take her black horn between my teeth and pull, and pull, and pull until both of us are bleeding. And I wonder if her blood would be more brine or magic, and which of the two would taste better.
I have never needed the permission before.
Perhaps it she was less of a monster and more of a unicorn, or a girl who had gotten to learn the innocence of being a child — perhaps then she might have recognized the warning in the other girl's eyes as something to be feared. That there was danger in two beasts who refused to relent, or go gently, or do anything but lunge straight for the throat.
And maybe she would have felt anything but the way her heart settles into a familiar death-knell of a rhythm that begs her to use teeth, and horn, and blade, and all the ways her magic is whispering to her of how to kill a dead thing. Every violent part of her is rising in her throat to meet the rage in another unicorn's eyes, and Isolt pauses only for a moment to wonder if it is more holy or profane that she should be so willing to consume her for it.
She smiles.
And the only answer she gives is in the way she moves her blade against than moonlight pale cheek like a caress (like she knows how to be gentle — but it is only ever a lie.) She taps there, bone to flesh, like she is tapping against a shell and listening to see if the sea answers her.
She tells herself this, when she presses the tip of it hard enough against her cheek to break the skin: just one drop of blood to take with her when she goes. Just one taste to remember her by.
But one drop had never been enough. Not for her. Not for the endless pit of rot that lies in her stomach, ready and waiting to eat, and eat, and eat.
Even now it is begging for more. Even now it is telling her how much better Avesta would look if she were dead, how lovely a garden her bones would make, how beautiful the flowers her sister would grow from them would be.
The way her teeth shine in the winter light is more snarl than smile. And that is the only warning she knows how to give before her tailblade twists to flay the scales off of a silver cheek, and she drops her blood red horn to her throat.
War is a thing, a terrible sort of thing, that lingers in the blood thicker than any disease. Insidious in nature it creeps, and burrows like a worm, and picks at the liver like a carrion bird a corpse in winter. The poison sits in my blood now changing me in all the ways the sea neglected to. I am a shape-shifter now: a girl, a weapon, a unicorn, a monster that does not seek only retribution but destruction.
I let her cut me and cleave a scale from my cheek like it’s a kiss stolen instead of flesh. I let her because it will be easier, when Aspara asks me of the blood between my teeth, to call it retribution instead of wrath, and war, and a sickness so deep it has burrowed into the black-sea center of my soul.
The shape of her teeth, the way they shine like stars waiting to be cut out of the black and be filled with moonlight, is the only permission I need the moment she touches me with violence. And I might be touched by her violence, but I am consumed by my own. I am devoured by it.
Foras is, in turn, consumed by his own as every inside of him sprouts through the outside fur of him like a weed as insidious as war. Winter rises from his skin instead of falling like snow from it. My breath, when I exhale the breath she failed to steal from her, turns to frost and ice.
How many stallions, how many things born in the womb of wrath, have tried to end me by laying teeth at my throat, or blade at my heart, or hate against my skin in one of the million shapes it might take? How many monsters have tried to devour me and in turn have been devoured? The answer, I know, when I will cut it into her skin will be enough to make a sea-map out of her.
If I am to die again it will not be at the blade of a thing shaping itself into a pale echo of war. I will die by the tide, or by war, and not by a unicorn acting like the wolf and the dragon that I was raised with.
Foras lungs for the unicorn, an easy thing when he’s larger than us both, and his claws do not move to beg entrance into her belly. They demand it. His snarl, when I twist my throat away from her horn and bare it in a dare to her teeth as my own jaw unhinges so that I might devour her better, is enough to rattle my heart.
I want to tell her that her teeth are made for roots instead of flesh. I want to tell her I can show her how to make them into something as dangerous as mine. But I think I will not tell her but take, and take, and take as she had taken from me.
I was born singing the songs of war from other worlds, in other lives, in other ages. And I was made remembering the way bones break beneath swords, and horns, and teeth, I was made to raise armies from all the skeletons left behind and forgotten.
I was made to end unicorns who think their wars were the only wars that mattered in this world.
It is why I was given an empty space between my lungs instead of a heart.
If there was ever a moment where Isolt has looked up at the stars and wondered why she was a creature made instead of a daughter born, the answer is there in the rage she can feel echoing in the other unicorn’s bones.
And if ever she wanted to ask if there was a way to make the hunger end or the pain stop, she is not thinking of it now when their horns become weapons instead of weights. She is not thinking of anything but the pulse in the other girl’s throat, the seawater-blood that lures her in in a way no siren song ever could.
Every bear, and coyote, and vulture is screaming at the violence in her eyes that promises a banquet about to be laid out. Below it all she can hear nothing else. She can feel nothing else. She can see
nothing
else.
Only the promises carved into her bones that tell her that one day, some day, she will unmake the world. And Isolt does not stop to ask it if today is that today (perhaps it is because she already knows the answer, and that answer makes her blood turn black and thick and terrible.)
But at the feel of teeth against her skull her rage turns to a snarl, to a whine, to finally a keening sound that she does not recognize as her own.
The only question that is left then is in the whimper hanging like seeds from her teeth. The wondering that sets in next, that insatiable desire that wants to scream and scream and rage at the magic that made her, oh how it burns.
All this hunger gnawing at her ribs, whittling them into spears.
All this pain of growing too quickly and still not quickly enough, of this pool of rage festering black and dark in the depths of her and not enough means to fill it.
Isolt was made with a war inside of her veins begging her to rend, and ruin, and consume. But she was born not knowing how to stop it, or control it, or how to form it into something she can wield. She is an explosion that burns out too fast.
And with the wolf’s claws at her belly, and his weight driving her down, still that dark pit begs for more. Still she wants to snarl around the pain, to tear herself open on another monster’s fangs if only to know once and for all that nothing — not even death — will make the pain of being a thing-made-with-too-much-hunger stop.
And she relents only as all wild things do: with the promise of next time. Tomorrow she will be stronger. Tomorrow she will learn from this. Tomorrow she will be more a weapon and less a girl.
Today she falls to her knees, and she is not sure if the roar in her chest is more hatred or reverence.
And never has she felt so young as she does from the ground.
Regret is not an emotion I have ever been comfortable feeling. Apsara has told me stories of it from the walls and the silks to thread-bare to glitter in the sun. Mother has told me stories of it and they all had, there in the middle of them like a mortal wound, the question what if over and over again until those two little words, what and if swallowed up any other part of the story I might have remembered. Father has told me about regret too. I can see it in his gaze when he looks so long at the horizon that I know it’s not this world, our world, that he’s seeing but something else.
And I do not want to be wall, and silk, and a mortal wound, and a world outside this single one that I know.
So when regret comes, right as she keens like a dying star I forgot to bury a wish in, I try to shove it deep down where the fodder for my nightmares lives. I try to blink it away and see only the glory of the gore, of arrogance felled, of a lesson taught. I try to scratch it away as I step closer to Foras as he drops his muzzle in the attempt to worry at her spine like it’s only a corpse instead of a unicorn.
But it lingers just like the ache below my eye where she cut a scale out.
It lingers.
And lingers.
Foras snarls at the feeling of regret in my heart when I use it to collar him, to settle him, to turn his rage onto a bison wandering through the deep snow. Part of me hates that I felt the need to turn his rage onto anything else but this girl brave enough to look at the war in my eyes and answer with her own. In another world, on another shore, we might have been more than this. It is so much easier, in the end, to tear open the neck of an arrogant man who is as far from a unicorn as my heart is from the desert.
It’s all the things we could have been that I’m thinking off when I walk up to her and press my ear to the whimper of a roar in her chest. And it’s all the things that part of me still wants us to be that I’m thinking of when I use my horn to pick a scale from my knee.
I scrape it across her lips, hard enough that I can feel the hardness of her teeth against my horn. “Next time,” I pull my horn away so that we might meet sea-eyes to blood-eyes. “just ask for one.” Regret is still blooming like a lotus flower in my heart as I turn away.
