And there's a millipede
Angry on your carpet
Oh and I must admit
He's staring with a vengeance
✧
I
wonder why there are so many dead things in the forest.
Is it because the leaves are coated in skins of frost, the air so cold everything glistens? Does winter collect dead things like a poacher collects furs? I look to Rook with these silent questions but he is staring down instead, down at the carcass, nothing but pale fur and a stomach torn wide open and guts strewn out on display.
My mask flips over my head as I peer down at it too. I prod hesitantly at a patch of matted fur that would blend near perfectly into the snow, were it not so covered with blood splatter.
It's eviscerated. Steam rises in fluttering waves off of the guts—entrails—and I turn my nose away, faintly disgusted. The marmots and hares the boys dissected back home weren't quite so torn and bloody.
E-vis-cer-a-ted. The word has a strange loveliness to it. Like:
Ex-san-gui-na-tion.
Bird—be quiet. I startle before looking guiltily towards Rook's dark, stiff back. I forget, sometimes, that he can hear me if I'm not careful enough. I back away from the dead thing until my tail presses into the golden fringe of a witch hazel.
I almost think back you were the one who taught those words to me until the carcass grows bloodier from farther away, and Rook grows a little bit less like a deer.
Biting my tongue, I remind myself that he hates death more than he hates me, and that I don't want him to think me the same as Ma.
"Fine," I say instead, my voice bouncing eerily from tree to tree. "I'll bury it."
Rook nods, his white antlers skating distractedly over my neck, before he turns away into the shadow of a snow-laden oak and takes all of his thoughts with him.
On the days that Rook is quiet, it's because he's remembered something he wishes he hasn't.
✦
I approach the torn up carcass like I'm afraid of it, but really it's because of the stench. It's perhaps a day past freshly dead, and even with the snow the smell of decay coats the inside of my nose like one of Elder's infernal perfumes, the ones in the colorful bottles she delights in making herself.
Sighing, I pull my mask as low as it will go over my face, inhale the familiar scent of feathers and bone and old death (like leather, or paper left out too long in the sun), and lean over to start digging the little body out from its thick shroud of snow.
It shouldn't be left there in the open. When I had buried the kingfisher, Rook had made me take it all the way out to the riverbed and scrape away layers of hard earth until I'd reached the soft mud beneath. I'd marked the grave with a smooth stone, and covered it all over with moss.
I'd seen Elder do the same many times, over graves both big and small, because even emptied bodies, she'd said, needed to be properly buried so that our magic (her magic) had no places to fester like rot.
When I've cleared away enough snow so that the carcass can be moved, I drag it gingerly out by its bushy, black-striped tail, and tell myself that there aren't any eyes watching me from the dark between the trees.
« r » | @Isolt
(the dead thing is a grey fox, though bird doesn't know this yet!)
There’s something calling for me, somewhere in the woods. With its final breath it names me Death, its last heartbeat makes for me a warning to follow. And when the death tremors set in, I tap my horn and move to its rhythm.
Most of the time, I do not know what I am looking for.
But I keep looking. And with every dying tree and rotting skeleton I come across, I ask myself, is this it?
She liked the way the forest sounded in winter. She liked the way the snow blanketed the trees in white, weighed them down like tethers, unable to free themselves from its hold. She liked the silence of a dead-and-hiding world, when the snow hares pressed close together in their dens and the only birds she saw were flying away from her, from the forest — never towards.
But even more, she liked the sound nature made when it gave up the fight at last.
The snapping of a limb echoes in the young-winter quiet, a sharp crackling sound that splits the world in two. Isolt stops to listen, and when she tilts her head like a wolf and peers into the forest it is like something in that dying tree speaks only to her. And whatever it is saying, makes her tail cut lines into the earth.
She does not feel like something living, when she turns deeper into the forest. Living things did not chase the sound of dying things the way she did, but knew to fly away like the birds. The thought makes her bare her teeth in an almost-smile, and her tail carves all the faster into the snow.
But this time —
This time, Isolt is not the first to find the waiting corpse staining the winter red.
She watches from the darkness between the trees, as the girl (gray, like the winter skies) digs away the snow shrouding the small corpse like a funeral veil. Everything in her is waiting, and wanting, and wondering — and if there is understanding, she does not show it. Isolt has never thought to bury the dead before. It has never been needed, not when the dead were only going to claw their way free later in the night.
When she finally drags herself out of the shadows, her tailblade whistles quietly through the snow like a promise of violence.
For one long moment, Isolt says nothing. She only looks from the stiffened, rent-open body to the masked girl holding it by the tail, then back again in silence. When she finally speaks it feels like she is chewing on the words, so that they come out slower than living things ought to speak. “Why are you disturbing the dead,” her voice is a whisper that does not lift the way a question should — it is only flat, like the words were dead before they left her lips.
In that moment, Isolt looks nothing like a unicorn should, has none of the innocence or incandescence of her twin. In fact — she looks more like the dead thing Bird pulls from the snow.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
✧
D
ead things are stupidly stubborn, even without a soul to fill them up and keep them warm.
My breath leaves me in spurts as I stumble into a patch of nettles when my hold slips and I pull out a chunk of fur from a mottled grey tail instead of budging the carcass whole from the bloody snow. There is fur from something dead in my mouth and my tongue turns thick and decaying.
My mood spoils like milk as I spit the fur out in flurries, like dandelion seeds, before I can figure out what it tastes like.
I am working up to proper infuriation when I breathe out once very slowly and remind myself that Rook will feel it if I do, and that it’s really very silly to be furious at a thing so long dead. Ma used to tell me to conserve my emotions. That they must be carefully rationed, like water in a desert, to be used up a little at a time and keep me from one day drying up.
Grimacing, I shake snow off my tail feathers and push up my mask until its cracked orange beak gawks a hello to the blustery sky. I begin digging again. The snow shroud is harder and more packed down than I’d thought, almost to ice; my hoof scrapes off individual, ruined snowflakes. I begin counting the number of scrapes in my head, to give myself something to do.
(And to distract from the tingling in my spine that won’t stop, no matter how many times I look over my shoulder. It’s a difficult thing, to dig up a body and shake off eyes from your back all while pretending like none of it bothers you. If I wasn’t so sure I had an audience I would’ve dropped this act after scrape number seven.)
When I am certain the snow is cleared away enough now to let its quarry go—I've scraped off so many snowflakes that tiny blades of brown grass peek out at me—I sigh before taking the tail back into my mouth and giving it a jerk. The body moves with a soft whoosh towards me and I almost smile, before I remember my shy, haunting audience and force it back down. I must remain unbothered. That way, they won't bother me.
That's what Ma always said. Sometimes I was almost disappointed with how well it worked.
Freed from its shallow grave of ice and snow, the dead thing is light and barely-there as it dangles helplessly from my mouth. Empty of a soul and a bellyful of guts, I suppose, lightens you up to air. I wonder if I am still being watched. My spine has stopped tingling yet I am not so sure it is because the visitor has left, or because—
“Why are you disturbing the dead.”
There is an eviscerated carcass between my teeth and I cannot scream. Though, I don't think I would have anyway—I am not easily frightened, and the voice is too whispery, like wind rustling the petals of flowers, for me to worry about the girl it belongs to.
She is red, like blood, and white, like snow. I wonder briefly, my eyes blinking slow, if she is so worried about the carcass because she was made from it—pieces of soul stapled together, a body to house it in sculpted hastily from the bloodied snow.
But that is witchcraft, and of Elder's variety, and if it were Elder's magic I would've smelled it before it could ever have smelled me.
I drop the carcass so I can speak and smile a little when it hits the snow with a soft thump. My mask is still raised up like a prayer to the Goddess' sky; it makes it easier to look at her, and let her see that I am looking at her, instead of hiding cowardly behind a mask that can't even smile. My hair is done up in looping braids like vines today, sprigs of swan-necked snowdrops tucked tight into every woven strand.
I tuck a braid behind my ear and nudge at the flopped-over carcass with my hoof.
“This?” I say, my voice echoic through the chill and setting dark. “... Because you shouldn't leave dead things just lying around. We'd be overrun by them before too long.” There is a flake of dried blood on my braid and I frown down at it; I blow breathfuls of air over it until it flutters off to the ground.
When I look back at the girl of blood and snow (who is so still except for the slice slice slice of her tail that it begins to irritate me) I remember my manners and ask her carefully, my voice as delicate as snowdrops, “Does it belong to you?”
Sometimes I am surprised to feel my heart still beating. It feels as though it belongs to someone else, someone more alive than dead, a mortal instead of a monster.
She can feel her heart beating inside of her chest, as steady as it is slow, and oh, it feels wrong, wrong, wrong. Each beat echoes inside of an empty chest, each thrum of her pulse in her ears makes her feel like she’s caught somewhere between waking up and falling asleep, always stuck in that endless in-between world where there is no light, and no soul, to cast shadows.
She breathes in. The air is so cold it scrapes down her throat like solid ice. Her lungs feel like so many flowers struggling to bloom, roots freezing in the ground, leaves turning to follow the sun, pores opening to the air, and it serves a reminder:
Isolt is only as alive as a forest dying in the young-winter’s grip.
No —
Isolt is the young-winter taking the life of the forest for her own, with stolen petals filling up her lungs and a thousand hearts that are not her own beating against her ribs, pounding their fists against her diaphragm and begging her to set us free.
Sometimes she forgets that is wrong. When she’s too busy growing a wilted garden with her sister and kissing the dirt and rot away from the bone-cheeks of their creations, filling their empty eyes with daisies and knitting their joints together with vines. She forgets that to survive on stolen lives with a belly full of blood instead of clover is not really living at all, not in the way the rabbits and the foxes and the sparrows all live.
Not in the way others live, she thinks as the carcass hits the ground and leaves strands of gray hair pressed into the girl’s lips like rotten dandelion fluff. She licks her own lips and wonders what the fur tastes like, and if it would grant as many wishes as a flower.
And she wonders if wishes made on dead things would still come true.
There is no wind, no sound, no life in the forest surrounding them. There is only the carcass separating them, its head twisted limply around to stare back at her, mouth opened in frozen laughter (or was it a scream? Sometimes she cannot tell the difference.) And there is a moment that Isolt tries — heart beginning to pound blood beginning to stir and burn and whisper — to raise it.
Close your mouth, she tells it silently. Until you’re ready to use those teeth.
But it only stares unblinking, unseeing, unmoving in the frozen ground. And the cool winter air is barely enough to keep her rage from boiling over.
“All the dead belong to me.” She takes a step closer, and there is an edge to her voice that sounds as if she were speaking to the corpse as much as to the storm-colored girl. Another step, and the black-tipped tail twitches. Another, and she spies a bit of root wrapping itself around the broken neck, twisting it back into place. Another, and the dead thing lies evenly between them.
Isolt tilts her head to the side, regarding the girl quietly. Her mask was pushed up over her head now, and it surprises her just how green her eyes are (so unlike death.) She follows the sharp curve of the crow’s beak with her gaze. She does not need to imagine what it would look like with strands of wolf lichen filling its empty mouth. One step closer, and she knows her magic would be reaching for it, too, and for every broken-necked snowdrop hanging like corpses in her mane.
“And who are you, to tend to them instead?”
It sounds like an accusation, hanging from her teeth. And the dead thing laying between them begins to drool with all of her hunger filling its belly.
Rest now my children
For soon we'll away
Into the calm and the quiet
✧
I
t is so cold that the longer I stand here, buffeted by snow and ice and wind, the more I start to envy the little grey carcass.
At least you don't feel cold, I think down towards it, as it lies still and sad at my hooves.
I know that dead things can't feel emotions, but since I was young I'd often imagined the animals Elder gave me to dissect as having various feelings, various protestations, as I rooted gingerly around its stomach or lungs or pink, shiny intestines.
I was always careful because of this—I couldn't cut open intestines to look inside, because the marmot would be sad; I couldn't peel apart a heart to count its ventricles, because the hare would be angered. I never told Elder or Ma about these practices of mine because I'd been raised wise enough to know that some things, even amongst blood, must stay secrets.
Carefully, I skirt around all thoughts of Rook, focusing instead on the carcass and the girl made of snow and blood.
I frown when I see that she's younger than me. Her limbs are knobbier, when I look at them closer, and her coat still wears traces of reddish foal-fuzz. I peer over her thin shoulders. Where is her mother?
When I was her age, Ma had never let me so much as step outside alone. She was always besides me, stroking my head, braiding my hair, asking me over and over and over: are you hungry, little bird? are you hungry? I would tell her yes, sometimes, even when I wasn't, just to see her break into a smile of relief. (Just to get her to leave me alone.)
But there are no shadows lingering between the snowcapped trees, because she is motherless, or maybe wandered too far away from one. Anyway I am not going to offer to help her look. I am not that type of a girl. I am preparing to open my mouth to tell her this until—
"All the dead belong to me."
The girl of snow and blood steps closer to me, and suddenly, I am chilled. It is not the bite of the bone-cold winter. It is not even the stink of the carcass below me. I can't tell what it is, at first, until I snake my nose forwards and look carefully inside her dark liquid eyes to see—
Nothing. There is nothing in them. They are like a doll's, with painted on irises.
I swallow. As empty as a shell, Ma had whispered to me once, when I was very small, when she had thought me incapable of understanding. But I had understood. All I can do, I know, is rattle.
But when I stare at the girl wearing my painted-on eyes, I am chilled.
My voice is hard and glinting like packed snow when I ask her, snidely, “All of them?” She steps forwards again and I clench my teeth when I hear the slice slice slice of her tail.
“That isn't true.” My eyes flick back, as much of a warning as I can give (because she is younger than me and doesn't know better) before I right them again. “The dead,” I say slowly, “are empty things. You cannot even eat them, like a wolf.” My eyes are dark beneath my flipped-up mask. What I don't say is that I am a dead thing, given back a patched-up soul.
What I don't say is that I surely do not belong to her.
If I had seen her make the carcass twist back its broken neck, and shift a snowy increment closer to her, I would've stamped my hoof down on the carcass's ribcage to ruin it before she could make it hers.
But I don't.
Instead, I am whispering very quietly in my head: Rook. (Somewhere in the forest, a black stag's head lifts, and branches crack to splintery pieces beneath his swift hooves.)
And then—
I lift my chin and flip my mask back over my head. “And who are you, to tend to them instead?” My breath steams the silent air in white, billowy clouds. Beneath the darkness of my mask, I smile. It is my turn now to press forwards, to tap-tap-tap my beak to her velvet nose.
Who am I? (I am Skyweaver's severed head Ma's shredded-up soul Elder's dead-eyed magic. A girl named Bird. More Bird than Girl; more girl than she would like to be.)
“Will you believe me,” I whisper to her, my voice like sparrows chuckling in an empty glen, “if I tell you that I am a dead thing come back to life?”
Beneath the mask, my breath is warm, and I am no longer chilled.
I have seen this look before. It’s the same one the people of my father's court give me. She looks at me like I am a child, like a thing-that-is-too-young-to-understand.
Oh, if only she knew. I know more of death than girls who carry crow heads around like hand bags. I know of monsters that crawl around in the dark with lichen bruising their cheeks and maggots crawling through the holes in their hearts. And I know how easy it is to turn bright-eyed things like her into those blind beasts crying out for their eyes that do not see.
There are a thousand ways for me to unmake her.
When she blinks, she can see the girl’s empty eye sockets gaping at her from within a bleached skull. She watches the daisies as they begin to bloom, sun-bright petals hugging the curves of her jaw while seeds crack between her teeth. Her storm-grey skin is gone, no teal runes mark her brow. The crow hanging lopsided from her poll is dusty and ragged, his beak chipped.
Isolt likes this version of her better.
A unicorn, as made as she is, does not know how to love anything else but death and destruction. She does not know that it is wrong to want to carve the truth across the other girl's throat with her horn, or to count vertebrae instead of wishes beneath her skin. She does not know that her horn could be anything more than a weapon, a tool by which to bring religion to a non-believer. She carries it now like a sword, as the ground beneath them begins to groan and the hemlocks bow their branches as if in reverence to her. And never does she think that it is wrong — that it is not her right — to be worshipped by them, root and rot alike.
She does not know that she is other.
And there is never a moment in which she pauses to wonder at where her mother-monster might be, or why other children hide beneath their own mothers' legs (she does not even know what it means to be a child — she has only ever understood that she is a unicorn, and a harbinger, and a thing-that-should-not-exist, and that was enough for her.) She only smiles (and smiles and smiles and smiles, with a look that seems more wolfish than girl) and lowers her horn to cross like a blade against the beak of the girl’s mask.
She can see the way it reflects color across its smooth surface, like blood spilt across a polished floor. It makes a shiver of delight course down her spine.
“Yes.” The word aches when she whispers it against the girl’s cheek. And if she is surprised by the beauty of mortal skin beneath her immortal lips she does not show it. The spaces between her teeth are too empty to show anything but hunger and violence and the memory of the sweetness of rotten things. “But you are not dead anymore.” And what she does not say is how that makes her worthless to unicorns with poppy hearts and morning glory lungs.
Her horn cries out with wanting when she twists it along the crow’s beak and drags it like a bow across a violin. It’s a gesture that promises an answer to every confession the crow-girl has not spoken, that live only in her too-bright eyes. It promises immortality, and the sound of it is the only music Isolt will ever know. It sounds like please, and like violence, and like a unicorn answering yes, yes, yes to the gloaming darkness.
Around them pine needles begin to rain like tree-tears, as sap grows mold in their veins and pinecones turn soft and black. And that, too, is the music her spore-ridden heart hums along to.
“All the dead,” she repeats, with the cool hush of winter growing thicker in her voice, “are mine to love, and mine to command, and mine alone.”
If Isolt has ever wondered why she was colored like blood, the only answer she has ever needed is coming awake in her magic now. And it’s there in the way the fox lying between them suddenly twists its head around, and lays its teeth against the crow-girl’s single white leg.
There she was, my new best friend
High heels in her hand, swayin' in the wind
While she starts to cry
Mascara running down her little Bambi eyes
✧
M
y mother thinks that the first emotion a girl learns is anger.
She confided this to me one morning back when I was no taller than her knee. It was late spring, because the dogwoods were blooming in creamy white bouquets and Ma had called me spring-bird. My name kept time with the seasons, to help me date all of my memories.
Come here, spring-bird. Your hair is undone. That's how she began every story; that's how, no taller than her knee, I knew to tuck in my smile and approach her on heedful-fox feet. She had beckoned me over to her before I could go to wake the willow-tree sparrows and fill their marble bath with well water. It was irregular. I disliked irregularity.
Ma's long black braids were pinned into a beautiful crown on her head and my hair was tumbling snow, untidied and grotesque in comparison. She hummed her secret thoughts to me while weaving my hair into a mermaid's tail. Dawn stole in through the open window.
The first emotion a girl learns is anger. She arrives into her mother's arms primed for it: slick from the womb and red with the shame of being born a daughter. Her first sound is a scream, her next a cry of injustice. Her tears are salty instead of sweet, her hair a sacred talisman never to be cut short.
Her shoulder blades are wings but her body is wood, kindling to feed a struck match. She is never the one to hold the match. It is always held for her, for safekeeping. Everything she is and owns is made to burn. Her room is a cage carved from oak and her bed is a funeral pyre. Anger is her oldest friend and bitterest enemy. She sleeps with it. She wakes with it. She is in love with it.
I knew my answer to her question before she asked it of me.
“Do you ever feel it, Bird?”
“I don’t feel it, mama.” She looked into my eyes with the ignorance of a mother. The black ribbon at the end of my braid circled my neck like a coil of rope. "I would like to go wake the sparrows, now."
-----
I have always been a proficient liar, and the only one who has ever caught me at it is dead. When I told him this story, he asked me at the end why I had lied to my mother.
"About what?" I asked.
"About not feeling it," Rook said.
I wound the stem of a snowdrop into his mane. "Because I don't want to be like her."
When the girl made of shed blood curls her cold breath across my cheek, I know that she is the one who holds the match. Drop it into the snow. The command drums against my ribcage, demanding its release. Drop the match into the snow, so that it will be extinguished.
I picture her hesitating; holding the tiny flame up to the light, examining it, then blowing it out. It would be for the best. Ma isn't here but I am, and I am my mother's daughter. I wish that I did not just have the skull and tail of a bird but the body of one too, so that I can fly away whenever I wanted. So that I can fly and laugh and picture the girl's body melting back into blood and snow without fear of making it true.
But then I hear my mask screech with horror when her horn slices across its beak. “All the dead,” she says, “are mine to love, and mine to command, and mine alone.”
And then, softer: an echoing, furious Bird! I don't feel the fox's teeth sink into my leg until I look down at it and blink at the ribbon of blood watering the frozen grass. An onyx hoof, cloven, stamps down on its smiling skull. I turn to Rook and swallow a laugh when I see the horror carved into the lines of his stag's face. I try and think, isn't this what you wanted, too? but run headlong into a wall bricked with a pulsing, writhing river of energy. It is impenetrable, uncrossable. I mistake it, at first, as Rook's doing.
He stands between me and the girl. Has the cold sapped away all of your sense? he snaps, his antlers glinting with liquid malice. This glade is thick with her magic. And you, daughter of witches, did not notice? It is easy to ignore him; his voice is but a trickling to the roaring red river.
I wonder if the girl's soul is as shredded as mine, except that it was not stitched back together as carefully. I don't realize that I am shaking until I shove Rook aside and nearly fall in the process. I right myself and limp forwards. Rook cannot hear me because of the river. He cannot move, either, because I do not allow him to. It is the first time I have exerted this type of control over him; he greets it with silent shock.
The bare trees around us are giant hulking beasts; they are ugly creatures, and I feel a hatred of the forest and its lost children sink into my bones in a sweet homecoming.
I don't stop until my shoulder is flush with the girl's. I stare down at her crushed creation, at the blackening pinecones, before plucking a wilting snowdrop from my mane and tucking it behind her ear.
“You will regret doing that to me,” I say softly. “You may control the dead, little cardinal, but they will never hold a candle to the living.”
My mask bobs like a boat on the sea. Smiling, I turn back, to Rook and to the end of the forest. As I pass, I kick snow over what remains of the fox's carcass with my good leg.
A burial; something only I can give.
« r » | @Isolt
felt like this was a good place to end! this was simply the most enjoyable thread ever <3
Oh, I can feel the violence rising. I can see it. I can taste it. I can hear it echoing in my pulse that beats sparrow-quick in my ears.
My mother taught me to rend, to ruin, to consume. She taught me how to tear antlers from deer and to pull hearts from between ribs. She taught me to feast until the pain of hunger goes away. I learned it well.
Isolt watches the girl and the deer with her dead gaze. She watches them as a god watches mortals, not understanding the unspoken words that tremble on looks between them, not caring what they mean.
She cares only for the dead thing that twitches in the ground. That cries out for her. That is still running in its dreams, that is still remembering the taste of life and aching for it. Isolt has no heart for the living but for the fox — for the risen thing she will make of it — Isolt will move the world for him.
Starting with a girl and her deer, if she needs to.
Her horn swings precariously between the two, wondering which of them will be the first to fall upon it like a sword. She hopes it is the girl; she imagines her death will be sweeter than his.
But before she can decide, Maybird steps forward. She presses their shoulders together, tucks a wilted flower into her mane. And she whispers a warning that carries less weight than if it had been snarled, or screamed, or even tapped against her cheek with her bird’s beak.
Isolt laughs.
It is not a kind laugh.
“The dead outnumber the living, girl.” Her voice is a snarl, a warning, a promise. “And one day, we will be the rulers of this earth.” She has seen it in the daisy eyes of each of her creations, in their pollen-spore hearts that beat brighter and faster than the muscle one in this girl’s chest. She smiles with her feral smile as the girl leaves her, and oh, oh, oh! how she aches to be following after her, carving lines in the snow, trailing blood enough to create rivers of it.
But the fox cries weakly with its rooted jaw. So Isolt turns to it.
She brushes the nose from his fur with a gentleness she reserves only for the dead and for her dearest sister. And when she turns to leave, to return to her gardens, to her twin, to their magic that twists together —
the fox drags itself on broken, frozen legs after her.
@maybird !
did we just finish a thread?! that last reply is gorgeous and I am going to have to keep re-reading it.
"wilting // blooming"
