It seems a foolish thing to think. He knows this. How can one not mean to leave?
If he were confronted—and he is certain he will be confronted—Aeneas already knows what he will say.
I was missing father—I… I needed to see father.
And someone might think, you are far too clever a boy to end up in Delumine when you ought to be in the dunes of Solterra—. They might even go a step beyond thinking it. Perhaps they tell his mother.
But those whispers will come too late to make much sense of. Those whispers will come after the relief of finding him, after the relief of knowing he is all right, the relief of recognising he did not mean to run away.
Not really—at least not to the point of never being found.
But isn’t that exactly why you chose Delumine? he asks himself. It’s the forest he loves so. It is the forest that, in his study, he gestured at with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. It had taken his tutor aback. Why yes, on the map that large green region is the Viride. It is the forest that fills him with whimsy and boyish dreams—he hopes, he thinks, to find a monster. He hopes, he thinks, to find something to make him feel brave.
Even the name Viride evokes a primitive chill, a primordial fear. That sounds like a place where boys go to get lost.
Not found.
By the time Aeneas begins to doubt the romanticism (because it must be romanticism, and not some kind of desperate plea for his father’s attention or, or, well any number of childish things) he is already deep within the trees. The sun is already setting. His goddess—or his mother’s goddess, whichever it may be—is already leaving the sky. The haze between the trees becomes dusky purple; opaque and faded. The trees themselves become disorienting, dancing in the clear winter’s air. The branches are leafless and bare, clawing at the sky and at his face as he presses through, deeper, into brambles and roots. In the true fashion of the naive, Aeneas does not follow a set pathway, or even a deer-trail. Instead, he finds himself deeper and deeper into a forest nothing like the storybooks he reads.
It is all enough to remind him that, at base, he is nothing but a boy. Not a prince. Not a hero of fables. A boy.
Aeneas feels afraid, when the last blinking light shuts out on the distant, obscured horizon. The trees embrace him into their darkness and soon, very soon, they begin to howl with the creatures of the night. The colt cannot keep still; he begins, first, to trot in hope of breaking some imagined barrier—he thinks if only he quickens his pace he might find an end, somewhere, to the endless trees—
But that brisk trot becomes, then, a canter. From the canter, he gallops with all the ungainly grace of a child; crashing through brambles and knee-high, yellowed grass. There are snowbanks deeper in the shaded regions between roots and beneath the larges trees, crusted overtop with ice and debris. Aeneas crunches through them as if he is walking over broken crystal; and further, further, surrounded by the hoots and bellows of owls and other beasts, he swears, yes he swears there must be a wolf on his heel—
In the darkness he sees the descent too late. He runs off a small ledge and into a dry stream-bed. The descent is not easy. The descent scratches his cheek and bruises his knees and, when he lands at last at the bottom, all he can think of is how badly he wants his mother back in the warm comfort of Terrastella. He feels the hot betrayal of tears building in his eyes but even here, even in the dark, he will not cry.
Or so he tells himself. But as the hours pass and he finds it impossible to stand, the night around him grows darker, deeper, even more impressive. He hears what sounds like a great and terrible beast snuffling through the undergrowth beside the stream-bed, and Aeneas does all that he can to make himself small, and quiet, his wings curled around his shoulders like a delicate veil.
Sometimes I wonder what I would look like, if there was not a monster living as a secret in my chest. I wonder if I could be red like the poppies instead of blood, or white like snow instead of bones.
I wonder —
what it would be like, to not be myself.
The forest is full of secrets. Secret whispers from root to leaf, flower to trunk. Secret bones, buried in holy groves where no one thinks to look, where no one visits to hear their groans.
Secret princes with sun stains on their cheeks, wandered too far from the safety they were too naive to know they ought to cling to instead of run from.
Secret unicorns without hearts, who have no right to walk among the living but still do.
If the moon were any closer to the earth Isolt would find a way to carve out its secrets, too. She waits with her horn pointed towards it now, its light hanging a halo over the violence it promises with every bit of moonlight dripping like blood down its curved edge. She does not see the beauty in the moon, the same way there is no beauty in the way a creature that should have been born to elegance was made for only death and destruction.
Around her the forest is still murmuring its secrets in every shake of its branches, every patch of moonlight breaking through the leaves, every whisper of black wings in a black night. Frost blooms in hellebore-patterns down her spine, rot dances overtop the blossoms. And she is listening, watching, waiting — and her horn is drawing circles of the moon in the air all the while. Her legs tremble like things desperate to run, while everything in her begs her to stay, stay, stay and wait —
Wait —
She breathes in like a wolf on the hunt, inhales the scent of winter, and snow, and rot. Her lungs quiver beneath her skin like bones breaking apart. Her heart speeds up when it catches the pace of something ‘other’, something that moves faster than a frozen forest ought to move. In the wind she tastes life instead of death, something that does not belong in the forest and oh, it feels like her bones are only so many monsters coming awake with a sharp crack.
Wait for it —
She breathes out into the darkness, tail tapping out her heartbeat on the frozen ground. In her veins her blood is singing its song of violence, racing when she lowers her horn from the moon and pierces the darkness with it. She leads the way with it, as her walk turns to a run, and then a gallop, and then something furious tearing apart the trees. The song in her blood hums louder, and even when she gives into the madness all she hears in it is faster, faster, faster. Like blood rushing from a wound, like a wolf’s teeth snapping just short of a rabbit’s fur, it sings to her faster. And with every step carving sickle moons into the earth, and every cut her tail makes in every tree she passes, the forest bleeds.
She finds him deep in the forest, where the brambles grow wild and tangled and reach out like claws to scratch her skin. It should have been a sign to him, she thinks — he should have known he did not belong here where the wild things cared little for princes like him. She wonders if he can feel it, the darkness pressing in, the bones in the earth shivering like lonely things ready to welcome him home.
For a while she only watches him from the shadows, creeping in ever-tightening circles while her tail shush, shush, shushes him to sleep in the undergrowth.
“It will not help,” her voice is a whisper, a threat, a promise. Her horn catches on the moonlight when she balances at the edge of the descent and points it at his form. “You cannot hide.” How fragile he looks to her as she looks down upon him, curled up at the bottom of a ravine. How much like a meal, already caught and trapped, waiting to be consumed. How easy it would be, to add one more secret to the forest, one more corpse to the grave he lies so willingly in.
The wind shivering down her horn sounds like a whine, and everything in her that is both god and beast is begging to dive down into the dry stream bed with him. It whispers to her of all the ways she could fill the stream with blood instead of water, to strip him down to bones (because they are the only part of him that belong in the winter-dead forest.) The wolves in her bones are howling like a pack closing in around its prey.
But she only blinks, and takes a step back. Another, and another, while the fury in her chest reaches a fever-pitch and everything in her begs to unmake him. She takes another step back, until all she can see are his eyes looking back at her from the pit, and then —
The trees he might have found beautiful during daylight sprout clawed fingers and scream with the wind in their branches. The smell of soil that, after rain or fresh with morning dew would delight him reeks instead of rot, decay, things losing and lost. He is serenaded by the terror of it; he is subdued by the heavy darkness, a darkness so deep it lays upon him like a blanket.
In that moment, Aeneas is struck by how little he knows of the world and how deep a little boy’s fear can run. Thorns and moonlight and unicorns and wolves, all things he does not belong to and cannot yet comprehend; they are tangled in that darkness, intimate, until one at last emerges.
It will not help. You cannot hide.
For an incomprehensible moment, Aeneas believes it is the trees speaking, or the dirt beneath him. But it is not. It is a girl’s voice and when Aeneas glances up, he can see her silhouette--
There is a whining, like wind whistling through wood, or bone. Aeneas squints, with cold terror freezing him to where he lays. He does not know how to respond, what to say; and when he opens his mouth to speak, nothing comes out except for a sad, quiet gasp.
But then--she moves to leave him.
Somehow, the leaving is worse than her presence, chilling as it may be. Aeneas jolts upright; he finds his legs, bleeding and unsteady as they are. With sudden swiftness, he scrambles up the incline. It takes him longer than he would have liked, but that--that seems a small detail, in a steadily deepening scenario. He is still struck through with fear, but it seems far worse to stay.
“W-wait,” Aeneas says. His voice is too quiet, even for his ears. “Wait--please, don’t go?”
Even as he asks it, even as he steps closer, there is something whispering to him:
No, no, no
don’t, don’t, don’t.
There is a chill up his spine; a creeping acknowledgement that something is amiss. Something deeply, terribly wrong.
to warm the blood of a world
not quite ready to live
but so tired of its own imagination
@Isolt | speaks
08-27-2020, 11:30 PM - This post was last modified: 08-27-2020, 11:31 PM by Aeneas
It is the way he looks at me. His eyes widen, in the way that all things-that-about-to-die do, but there is something else, something beyond fear. And I realize —
I do not want to be what they expect me to be.
I do not want to be a monster.
The thought comes suddenly, intrusively, spreading like ice down her spine.
Isolt freezes, one foot still raised in the air like the paw of a lioness on the hunt. One step, and she would be gone, melting away into the darkness. But she does not take that step.
Not yet.
His voice reaches out to her, rooting her in place.
The wind whistles through the trees like a wolf. Isolt closes her eyes and listens to it, listens to the boy’s delicate heart fluttering like a bird inside of his chest. It nearly matches the pace of his frantic scramble out of the gully, rocks and twigs rolling beneath his hooves. Her own heart speeds up at the sound of it, like it wants nothing more than to break past her ribs and chase after it. And she wants nothing more than to let it. The endless hunger, the aching, the need to hunt — it all comes back with a flash of blood-red suns against her eyelids.
He should know better, she tells herself, listening to his pulse fly. This will be his fault.
A branch cracks in two under his hoof when he steps closer, and her eyes flicker open at once.
“You should not ask me to stay.” Her voice is whisper-thin, nearly lost in the shadows surrounding them. She turns slowly to face him, with all the wistfulness of a starving dog sharp as moonlight in her eyes. She can see his pulse now, drumming in the hollow of his throat, just there behind his cheek, and oh, oh —
oh!
Isolt can feel the cosmos burning in his blood, and she wants to bleed out all those stars and suns filling his veins. She wants to find out if the liquid in his veins is red or gold, and if it blazes like fire, and she wants to paint the night with it. Her tail blade cracks sharply against a stone, but the sound not nearly as loud as the racing of her heart, of her magic, of her furious hunger. Isolt is drowning in the music of it.
“What—” She stops abruptly, teeth clicking together, licking her lips. Only monsters would ask that question, she reminds herself. Only monsters define themselves by what they are — and she does not want to be a monster. Not tonight. Not even with all the wolves clawing at her belly, howling in her throat, filling her mouth with drool.
She swallows them down, all of them, and tries again.
And the way she says it feels wrong, sounds wrong, is wrong. “—Who, do you think I am?” The moonlight drips down her horn, makes every hollow curl of it look twice as sharp. The wolves are telling her that this is the way of the hunt, that the only thing the boy needs to know about her is that she was born knowing how to carve the magic out of bodies like his.
But Isolt starts to wonder what else he sees, beneath the promise of violence weighing heavy on her brow.
In a strange way, she is the only thing in this realm of darkness that is familiar. It is her shape, if nothing else: she looks like a girl, like a unicorn, and in a land of magic her spiral horn is the foil to his Pegasi wings. The darkness, to him, is hostile; the ancient wood; the whispering trees. The entire forest sways and creaks with a rhythm like the sea, and nothing like the sea. Not even the ground does not seem firm beneath his feet, even as he stands.
You should not ask me to stay. Perhaps if he were older, wiser, he would recognize the note of danger in her voice. The way those simple words manifest more threateningly than the howling of wind through any hollow tree. Still, Aeneas draws nearer; hopefully nearer; the foolish fly that sees the spider and wonders, salvation?
Aeneas is no fool, however, despite his naivety; as her magic clamors loudly in her mind, so too does his. The answer is bright red; he glows the color of a slit throat, pulsating, furious. The forest becomes awash in it, in his growing desperation, and with a strange suddenness the pine needles from the evergreen above begin to turn yellow and fall in a quiet rain.
What—she begins, and then amends: Who do you think I am?
“Who?” he repeats, almost dumbly.
It doesn’t make sense to him. But he draws nearer still; the darkness, bathed in his eerie red glow, does not seem quite so threatening. She is dark, too, and mottled with a lightness like a blanket of snow. He is almost near enough to touch her; but the pine needles continue to rain down, and the energy around him is volatile, nearly explosive, with his fear.
“If—if I am going off the fables—“ his voice is needle-thin, and high, and seems the only sound outside the wind and his thrumming heart. “Then you must be my saving spirit. My guardian angel. I was alone, and you found me.”
Boys with magic in their lungs and dreams in their eyes. Dreams I was meant to end, and magic I was made for consuming. I did not understand then why they should be any different than the others I was made to destroy but now — now I know.
It is in the way he looks at me, and how my heart rages against it.
There is magic curling in the boy’s veins, magic enough to bring the sky crashing down to the earth.
And he is red — of course he is red, the world is always red in the places where her shadow falls across it — glowing red, light spilling from the bloody marks around his eyes, his legs, his wings. It beats like a heart.
Isolt’s own heart trembles to catch the pace of it. And then, like a wolf chasing after the hare, it settles into his rhythm.
And when she presses closer to him (and closer, and closer, close enough to touch the tip of her muzzle against one brown, ruddy wing and close her eyes against its light), she sighs. If she is surprised at all to feel his mortal skin beneath her immortal lips, or to find it cooling the fever of her cheek when her eyelashes flutter like butterflies against it, she does not show it. If she is surprised to feel the energy so much like her own, so ready to explode, there is no hint of it when she reaches out and lays her cheek against his wing. She only blinks like a doe caught in the morning sun’s light, and traces the tip of one long feather with her teeth.
How easy it would be to rip it out. How easy it would be to tear a wing from a body. Just there, in that hollow space beneath the joint, a perfect resting place for her horn.
But her father had wings, she reminds herself. Wings more fragile than this mortal boy’s — but it feels like a crime then, as if to do this now would be as if doing it to Ipomoea himself. So she begs the monsters rising in her throat to stay down, down, down, and trembles when she feels them relent. Down her chest they crawl like botflies down the throat of a corpse flower. And Isolt only hopes that she is like the corpse flower in this: that her monsters will stay trapped long enough to see this boy walk away.
Even so, every pine needle that touches her back turns black, and fermented, and crumbles to pieces that flow down her sides like tarry tears.
She could almost laugh then, when he names her spirit and angel, savior and guardian. With her rotten tears and her horn swinging like a noose between the darkness and him, with the magic in his blood singing so sweetly her teeth ache to pull it from him. How perfect it seems, a prey so willing to be devoured.
“Do not call me that.” She pulls away from him with a sigh, a whisper, cringing from the light that seems to her like her own soul laid bare in the forest. “I am no one’s savior.”Only death, her tail draws in arcane lines through the rotten pine needles, and ruin, and despair, and the end.
And then a whisper, in a voice that is far too gentle to belong to a unicorn that is more made than born:
One day, Aeneas might understand what it means to be a black hole; to possess a gravity so severe that no particles can escape from it. A spacetime deformation. A hunger that can be replicated only by the ravenousness of the mortal heart, of the way emotions and needs and wants separate the flesh from self, the self from soul, the soul from space—
Her nearness is strange to a boy accustomed only to his family. He thinks he should be brave, and tells himself, she is only a girl, as if her presence does not mimic the haunted eyes of wolves in the woods, waiting for the winter-weak deer to die.
(But what could Aeneas possibly know of this? What could he, the winter-born Prince, understand of suffering that is not in and of itself elevated? Aeneas does not know hunger. He does not know cold. He does not know the fear of a thing that runs for it’s life, not until now, not until in ignorance he ventured forth as if a knight to vanquish a beast—)
And where is that beast?
Does she sigh against him, her mouth against one feathered wing? Elegant and perfectly useless. Teeth against down. Hunger against the abstemious. He is already too pious; too willing to suffer; too willing to be breathless beneath a baptism.
His energy undulates; he is red and gold and then red again, just as she is hungry-to-merciful-to-hungry again.
(But the mercy was there, as his wing extends just-so, and his contour feathers reach beyond her teeth to caress the edge of her cheek).
Do not call me that.
“Then who do you want to be?” Gold again; soft; the memory of a forest in the sun, the memory of warmth, the memory of something else.
He is not shaking any longer; he does not know when the fear began to dissipate, began to become something else—fragile, blooming curiosity. He is, if nothing else, a child—and they are quicker to forget their fears than one might expect.
(Was it not Romulus and Remus who were caressed by a wolf, once, as mere babes?)
“But—we can’t always save ourselves.” He isn’t arguing. Aeneas says it with bashful, uncertain innocence. He almost doesn’t add more, but then: “Or… well, or there wouldn’t be heroes.”
This does not seem like the place for heroes. But, perhaps, that means it is a place that needs them the most.
We are not the same. A Unicorn will never be the same as a Pegasus, I know it even before I have a reason to. He was not made to hunger, or to end things, even his light destroys the darkness l embrace. I was not made to be gentle, or kind, or good, but sometimes —
Sometimes, I think maybe it is not too late to choose.
Isolt has never seen a forest drenched in sunlight. She is too new, too young, too made in winter — and already it feels like a lifetime of it.
Bones snapping as they grow too quickly for a newborn body. Heart racing as more and more blood pools into it. The memory of something else, something other, a world that existed before she did but will not exist after her (she would make sure of that.) Her made-in-magic thoughts remember, even when she does not, what it means to be a unicorn dressed in blood and bone instead of innocence.
And her bones remembers spring, and remembers that her father loves the spring, because in spring things are growing a little faster than they are dying.
His feathers touch her cheek, and she is frozen. Everything in her, every terrible, lovely piece of her is trembling at the touch, and begging her to take that feather between her teeth and pull, and pull, and pull. Until this winter-prince unravels, so that she can unmake him piece by golden piece.
But she doesn't.
And the aching sets to howling when he asks her — gentle and and innocent as a lamb, and she the monster he does not yet know he should be afraid of.
"I want to not be myself." To not have all of this hunger tearing her apart, claws at her throat and fangs in her belly, a pack of wolves running in her veins. She wants to recognize his gold as sunlight, as warmth, as life. She wants —
oh, she wants a hundred things. And most of those wants start with blood.
Isolt is a unicorn made of magic, and hunger, and the horn weighing heavy on her brow is curled and hollow for a reason. The truth of it is lying there before him like a noose, grim And unmistakable. And Isolt does not know if she should be thankful that he does not see it, or if she should carve it in words across his skin.
She only knows that he is too gentle a thing to belong in her forest of monsters. "Heroes are only those who have decided to be the saviors instead of the ones who need saving. You should decide now which you would rather be, or the world will decide for you." She does not tell him the third option — that for every savior there is also a villain, as terrible as they are good. Better to let him stay innocent, to not recognize his death when it draws near. Beater to not feel fear, but to die quietly. Peacefully.
She regards him quieter for but a moment, before she turns away with a sigh that is as then as the paper - bark that trembles as she walks by. “Come,” she tells him as she breaks the darkness apart with her horn, "and I will show you the way out of the forest."
Aeneas has yet to learn not everything in life is a grand adventure.
He has yet to learn the gilded pages of the fables in his room cannot be transferred to real life. The characters are, now and forevermore, only characters. Shades of what people ought to be, with conveniently packaged lessons, with clever words and cleverer actions. They are brave and smart because, in a story, everything aspires to make them out as such.
He has yet to learn life is nothing like this.
He has yet to learn that bravery is only half the story. That optimism has cloudy days. That fear—real fear—cannot be triumphed by courage one does not possess. He does not have the experience, the context, to see Isolt as something or someone to fear. It does not matter her tail is a scythe, her horn a spiraled spear.
After all, the sword in the storybooks is not monstrous. The blade itself typically belongs to knights, to heroes, to those who use violence only as a means to protect or save.
So, when she says, I want to not be myself Aeneas cannot quite understand. Who else, he wonders, could she possibly be? But then, in the quiet that follows her statement, he thinks of every time he lost control of his magic; he remembers the raw surge of power; the way someone else’s negativity can seep into the cracks of who he is, can saturate him, until he does not feel like himself at all—
Heroes are only those who have decided to be saviors instead of the ones who need saving. You should decide now which you would rather be, or the world will decide for you.
The brutality of her words—the whetted honesty of them—alarms Aeneas. He is unfamiliar with the harshness and nearly flinches. Perhaps he might have, if the energy from her had remained volatile; now, it is as turbulent as he is. “Have you already decided, then, what you will be?” He does not know how she will answer, or if she will answer at all.
But then Aeneas is stepping forward to follow her; hesitantly at first, and then with more strength. It is as if, in his fear and with the length of the night, his body has forgotten how to respond to movement. He is cold to the bone; but somehow, even if it is simply his subconscious, he recognizes that beside her he has nothing to fear.
“Thank you,” Aeneas states, although the gratitude seems inadequate; it does not seem a proper repayment for her kindness, but he does not know what else to say.
The forest at night is hungry. It presses in around us, watching us, watching me — I wonder what the trees are whispering. Do they know how I want to lay my horn at his throat and dig out the artery that lies there and calls to me?
Would it weep or rejoice if I did? Would I?
Her father had told her of the way the forest wept, the first time it tasted blood on its roots.
What Isolt did not tell her father is this: after that first day, the forest had not only learned the difference between water and blood, it had begun to hunger for it. And now it does not cry when it tastes blood —
it cries when it does not.
She can feel the way the trees have grown twisted beneath her hooves (not all of them, but enough to count). She can feel the way they hold their buried bones close, how their branches have become claws reaching out for the pegasus-that-does-not-belong, not at night, not when the wild things are awake, awake, awake.
He should not be here, in her winter forest at night. That is what she tells herself as she leads him through the trees, following the silver sliver of the sickle moon through the branches.
There is only silence following his question, and the sound of the frost cracking beneath their hooves, and the roar of her heartbeat in her ears (so loud she wonders that he cannot hear the way her blood is humming.) And when she sighs her breath curls like smoke above them, and the tap, tap, tap of her tail against her hip speeds up.
She does not tell him that she is the thing he should be hiding from but it’s there, it’s there in the way the moonlight turns bloody as it falls upon her horn. “I am Isolt.” And again the frozen ground shivers. And again she tells the bones and the disease-twisted roots to stay down, down, down, as she swallows the monsters and the magic alike.
Somewhere wolves are howling, far in the distance, and Isolt only quickens her step, and she does not look behind to see if he is still following. She breaks into a trot skims across the ground with an almost-grace, and she does not stop until she sees the break in the trees ahead of them. She leads him out into the moonlight, where the snow is shining and the crack of ice underhoof sounds more like laughter than things dying.
“You would like the forest better in the day. It is a happier thing then.” She tries to smile for it. But the smile is a broken thing on her lips, one full of teeth instead of joy.
And already she is edging back to the darkness of her waiting forest. “You will have to find your way from here,” she whispers as the distance between them grows wider and wider like a wound, “next time, look for me in the wild parts of the city.”
She does not say if he comes back. Already she knows he will be back again in the same way she knows the spring is coming, even when she has not seen it for herself. Her smile flickers and fades like the death of a star, and before waiting for his reply she turns and disappears back into the forest. And this time, Isolt does not stop running, or hunting, or searching, or aching, until long after the sun has risen and exhaustion makes her legs give out.
Aeneas does not mean to leave. 
The forest is full of secrets. Secret whispers from root to leaf, flower to trunk. Secret bones, buried in holy groves where no one thinks to look, where no one visits to hear their groans. 