I am counting diseased flowers like other unicorns count stars. I can see it there, before the others do — the specks of black that look like pollen, the sludge that moves up their veins instead of water. I can see a tulip beginning to bow when it becomes too weak to stand.
I am looking for it. I am helping it along because it is the only way I know how to cure the sick. And I wonder —
I wonder how others do not see it.
A
s she walks through row upon row of planted tulips, she is not listening to the whispers that follow her. And she is not watching for the eyes that follow her, or the looks that tell her (as if she did not already know) that she is other. She only walks on and on and on until she gets to the patch of flowers that are as white as picked-clean bones laid out in patterns across the field.
Today all Isolt sees are the flowers trembling on their long, thin stalks as she walks amongst them. And in the absence of wind, or song, or a reason to dance — she knows it is her who makes them shiver as though it were still winter. Like a den full of rabbits huddling close to one another for warmth while the wolf waits outside.
The thought makes her lips curl into a look that is more snarl than smile.
When the edges of the first tulip turns black and begins to curl in upon itself, she is still smiling. And she is still smiling when she hears the too-sweet, fermented smell of it fill the air like honey, like peace, like death. And she leans in close to it, close enough that her lips brush against the petals as softly as a kiss. At her touch the tulip begins to weep pollen instead of tears, and Isolt can hear it beginning to cry as its stalk gives out and it crumbles to dust at her hooves.
Somewhere, she knows, her sister is learning to love her own rotten flowers. And somewhere their father is growing new rows, and new patterns, and new life to replace the ones they are hollowing out.
But here in this row there is no purity, or honor, or holiness, or life. There is only a new-god who smiles a unicorn’s smile, and a circle of death that sparks to life beneath her lips.
When the second tulip dies like the first (but with a shriek instead of a cry), she collects its rotten pollen like black sludge tears along her eyelashes. And when the third tulip dies (this one with a shriek, and petals that turn sharp as knives before they break against the skin of her), still her smile does not waiver.
It is not until she has stopped counting that she begins to wonder if her sister would, were she here. And it is only then that she looks down on her garden — for the spot of death in a field of life is as much her’s as the bones that lay hidden in the earth — and sees only her sister’s face looking back at her in every wound that bleeds pollen and ash.
And if she were less of a thing made in magic, or less of a monster wearing the face of a unicorn, she might have felt remorse for the deaths then. She might have learned that she could walk away and leave the field for those who still dream in flowers to enjoy. She might have recognized the war drum beat of her heart as a hundred wishes — a hundred aches and wants that beg her to move away and find a song that will not lead her into madness.
But she is a monster. And the eyes that watch her as the not-monsters hurry away from the plague reigning like freedom among her tulips is all the affirmation she will ever need.
Her circle of death only grows, and grows, and grows around her until the only color that is left in her shadow is a blackness deep and terrible. The hunger inside of her chest grows teeth, and claws, and sets them all against her ribs with all the rage of a wild thing determined to escape.
And in the center of that dark circle a single cardinal flower begins to grow, tall and bloody and beautiful.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
T
here is nothing wild about her.
She is calm but comely, the young girl. She has a gentle way about her (when she casts shadows on plants, she shifts to again allow the passage of sunlight). Elli stands alone and everything still happens around her, and would happen without her (the sun would still arrow across the sky, the animals would still weave and dig and climb through the land and night would still pull a cloak over everything). She is unmoving through it all. So still that she forgets to breathe and by the time she remembers, chokes on the air that hurriedly fills her lungs.
She is strange, perhaps, but not wild.
Not like the flowers, her mother’s flowers that sprout and grow around her. That sprout and grow just like the stories that now whisper between thin stems and beautiful petals. They talk about a girl, about a unicorn. They say she is strange and Elliana listens.
She has always liked strange.
This is whens she realizes why she keeps feeling that stuttering chill, raking down her spine like glass. She can sense the flowers that are dying, dying when they should not be, but dying all the same. It is her, it is her, she is sure of it. It is then she knows where to find her. Death points her like a compass. But it does not point north, but to a hole dug six feet into the ground.
She walks, and walks, up and down the rows, and it is not so much Elli’s feet that lead her, but her soul. It bounces and jostles around inside her, first at the tip of her forehead, telling her where to go, and then it sinks down into her chest, telling her she must go, and then it spills into her bones and her blood and she is consumed by it. She must find her, this is all she needs, all she wants. At least Elli thinks.
The girl will have this thought again, about what she wants and what she needs. It will come later in life, but at the heart of it, it will be the same, it will still be about those god-forsaken unicorns and the death of things and the ghosts. She will think about all the she needs, all that she wants.
Isolt is not the only creature who hears that flower cry out. It comes to Elliana as if across the planes of a dream and she turns and she finds her. She watches a smile creep across her face like the blood Elli saw that day she followed her mother to the hospital. How it dripped, dripped, dripped. But her smile, Elli thinks, does not drip, it is smeared across her face like someone trying to clean it up, clean up the blood.
And everyone moves from the monster as she stands there in her burial site made of flower petals and rotten roots. Everything inside Elliana is screaming like death, like dying flowers, and she has not felt so alive since the last time she was surrounded by more dead things than live things. She has not felt so much like home. And it is the birth of that red flower that sends her forwards, towards the girl, as if cartwheeling across the dirt. “Does it feel like a graveyard inside of your chest?” She asks her as she draws closer, and though her voice is soft it is hollow, like an echo. “Or does it feel like a garden blooming?”
I know her. This girl from the forest, this child who is so eager to death. I can feel it wrapped around her like a cloak, like disease, like rot creeping up the petals of my flowers. I wonder when it will reach her heart.
I wonder — and I know it is not today.
T
he flower is blooming bloody and bright and beautiful. And even when its stem grows twisted, and its petals curl over backwards, and its leaves wilt beneath the specks of disease and rot weighing them down — still, still, Isolt does not look away.
She traces every unholy edge, commits all of it to memory so that she might repaint it in words for her sister. For the moment — only this moment — her circle of death has stopped growing, and reaching, because here in this single flower she can feel the wolves in her belly beginning to curl together in slumber.
And she starts to feel the ache of it, of beautiful things destined to wilt, and rot, and die. If she has ever wondered how a flower could make her sister both laugh and cry she will never need to wonder again. So as the flower grows with bent spines and hanging heads, she presses understanding into their petals.
It is there that Elliana finds her, bowed over her flowers like they are the god and she is the sinner falling to her knees before them.
She remembers her, the girl from the forest. And perhaps it is lucky then that her hunger is half-sated when she comes to her today, that she is not so desperate to fill the earth with more bones and blood. Perhaps it is a good thing that there is only one twisted flower of death in her circle and not a field of them to drown her in.
Isolt watches her come forward (like a dancer, like a child who does not know any better). She wonders where her ghosts are now, and why they’ve left her; but the thought is fleeting, and in a moment it is replaced only with the red of the petals spreading like blood from a wound through her mind.
“There has never been a difference between the two.”Not to me, her eyes are promising. Flowers were always grown in graveyards, to hide the smell and look of death. And flowers were always draped across every casket, in every funeral parlor, bouquets clutched close to the hearts of the diseased — flowers were as much for the dead as for the living.
Never before has Isolt felt so much like death as she does now, watching as the girl from the forest draw closer and closer like a botfly to the corpse flower.
And again she wonders how the girl who dances with ghosts does not see it, living there in every violent curl of her horn as proof. “Do you like my flower?” her voice is little more than a whisper, as she presses her lips to the petals and dusts them with pollen. And when she lifts her head and smiles, she can taste the poison spreading like honey across her teeth.
Poison has always been like honey to her.
Her tail moves as quickly and silently as a scythe, a soft whistle through the air as it cleaves stem from body. Isolt holds the flower out like an offering to the child. And when she asks her, “would you like to taste it, Elli?” it sounds like she is really asking —
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
A
re you ready for your grave yet, Elliana? She would ask.
Not yet, Elliana would say.
She watches the girl and the flower, the flower and the girl. Her mother told her a story once about a walk in the woods, and how it was scary, but at the end, she found the most beautiful of flowers, the one with the flame that she wears on such special occasions. She thinks of that flower now, in front of Isolt and imagines placing it in her hair, right behind her ear, and let the rest of her hair fall around it. In her mind, Isolt is beautiful, wolves in her belly and all. A girl born from hunger (shadows for light and light for its shadows) was bound to feel such aches in her bones, such desires.
Are you ready for your grave yet, Elliana? She would ask.
Not yet, Elliana would say.
Maybe, she should not be so enlivened to stand here staring death’s child in the face, her pitch fork of stem and petals so tauntingly close. Elli hardly seems to walk, when she moves across the ground she cartwheels, limbs flying around in a circle, hair loose, flowing and tumbling. There are no ghosts in the daylight, but that does not stop her from seeking out that which is dying and that which brings death. Isolt sees red, but Elliana sees blue. Or maybe it is just her own eyes, across that bridge she will one day cross staring back at her.
Are you ready for your grave yet, Elliana? She would ask.
Not yet, Elliana would say.
“Both are beautiful things,” she says, an agreement with the girl if for different reasons. And she is not a botfly when she comes close, but a butterfly, like her godmother before her. Because she is not so interested in the dead things, but what lives on after them. Elliana raises her head to view the horn that protrudes from the girl’s head. She wants to touch it, like her sister’s had pressed against her chest, but her blue, blue eyes are the only thing that rest themselves against it. “Yes, I love your flower,” she says because she is capable of separating the girl from the flower, wonders how long she will be capable of such things. Especially when cuts across the stem and offers it in such a fashion.
Are you ready for your grave yet, Elliana? She would ask.
Yes, Elliana would say.
“Yes,” Elliana says. “But only if you taste it with me.”
I knew from the moment I came into this world — the hunger, the aching, the taste of poison against my teeth.
This girl — I do not think this girl knows. I do not think she has tasted nightshade or run with risen things beneath a full moon. She has not snapped a sparrow’s neck or weaved its bones through another unicorn’s mane.
But I could teach her.
T
here has always seemed to her a certain sweetness about the taste of poison. Like honey, or pollen, or rose-hip tea; like the flowers her father grew for them that always fermented like syrup on her tongue.
But it was what came next that was sweeter than the taste of it.
The quickening of her heart as her veins turned to brambles and roots tangled together. The tingling of her skin like she had only ever been a thing in the middle of metamorphosis, a butterfly ready to tear its old body apart to escape (but Isolt knows it would not be a butterfly climbing out from the corpse of her. it would be something far more terrible, far more lovely, far more monstrous than that.) The way the whole world narrowed itself down to the petals caught between her teeth, the way all that mattered was one more taste, one more drop —
one more slip of death between her ribcage.
She is waiting.
She is laying flowers along her own grave. She is watching Elliana dance overtop of it like she was holiness rotting away in the ground. But oh! how much sweeter it would be to see the child rotting beside her, to see the blue of her eyes replaced with monkshood and bluebells.
How much sweeter it might taste then, when Isolt grinds petals between her teeth and commands her to rise, rise from your grave and be mine.
Elliana is not ready but oh, she could be. And she would be there to show her how gentle death could be, and how splendid the immortality that falls like seeds from between her teeth would feel. All she had to do was say yes and Isolt’s waiting, her aching, her hungering, all of it would be over.
The blade of her tail twitches, ready to carve flower after flower after flower from her twisted stalks and offer it like medicine down the girl’s throat instead of poison. But not yet — not yet — not yet. Elliana’s day was coming. But today Isolt could give her a taste of it.
Her smile turns sharp and feral. Already her cardinal flower is blooming again, twin flowers rising from the cleaved-off head of the first like a many-headed monster. Another quick cut and they are floating beside the first (and as the next begin to bloom she feels her heart stutter, feels her lungs begin to tremble like flowers drying in a windowsill. She wonders if this is how her sister feels, before the nosebleeds start; she wonders if Elliana would taste her blood with the flowers if she offered it.)
“Of course.” There are too many promises in her eyes, too many warnings in her voice, in her teeth when she smiles, in her horn as it lowers to the flowers and spears one through its center. This she passes to Elliana until the petals (and the spine-sharp tip of her horn) brush against her lips.
She is watching her when she eats.
She is waiting when the first shiver of wildfire courses down her throat, and her heart begins to whine like a dying thing, and poison-pollen drips from her teeth.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
S
he dreamed once, of that grave they found in the forest. (This is a lie, she has dreamed of this grave more than once, more than twice.) There were flower petals, all around, over the snowy landscape. Petals of red, of blue, of green, and orange. There was no yellow, she would contemplate on this later and never come up with a reason. But she danced through the petals, over them, between headstones that rose out of the snow like the tulips did this spring. She skips, she leaps, twirls, and jetes, over the plants. Until she comes to that grave, that big, dark, empty hole in the ground that opens wide like a chasm. She stares down, deep, into it. And you know what they say about the abyss if you stare into it long enough.
It stares back at you.
And she thinks she sees an echo of it in Isolt’s eyes.
Her smile only confirms this as it curls like petals in the wind. Like the flower Isolt cuts now. Elli’s blue eyes turn to the, can feel them dying the moment she cuts them like a knife between rib bones. Cut again, cut again, cut again. Still, others grow in its place. She wonders what would happen if took those flowers home, showed them to her mother. Elli knows she would not smile, she would frown, the creases in forehead, in that ivory heart they both share would appear. And Elli would wonder once more why she is so different, so strange, so in love with the things they all think would be better in the dark. Whether it be ghosts or wilted flowers, they are all the same.
A flower is offered to her, and Elli watces it like something precious. Maybe because it is, are where her thoughts wander to, heart racing. She takes it between her lips, and it tastes like the honeysuckle she will taste come summer. She suddenly feels everyone one other nerves blooming like flowers. There is a flame in the center of the petals, because Elli feels the soft heat of fire in her throat. She opens her mouth expecting to see smoke, but only words fly out. “What do we do now?” Ash settles on her tongue.
I know what comes next. I have always known: it is the sickness, the too-quick beat of her heart, the song in her chest that is calling, calling, calling to me. I could end it. By petal or by blade I could end it. It is the way of things.
But I do not. Why do I not?
T
here is something burning in her veins, and Isolt knows it both is and it is not the poison.
lt whispers to her as it crawls through the chambers of her heart, and settles like plague in black specks on her lungs. That magic, her lovely and terrible beast of a magic, stretching itself out to fill even her smallest capillaries.
Somewhere Isolt is smiling. And she is spreading her arms open wide to welcome it into her. Every burning, festering drop of it finding a home in her blood.
That magic, she knows, does not know how to relent. She knows it would destroy this girl with a smile if she allowed it to, one precious, poisonous petal at a time. It is only now as she watches elliana eat the flower, and eat, and eat, and eat — only now does she begin to think that maybe the does not want that.
Isolt who is ready to consume the world, Isolt who is always trying to devour the sun, devour the moon, devour their life; Isolt is not sure she wants Elliana to die.
Later she might blame it on the way the magic grows fainter and fainter in her grasp, how her heart begins to stutter and with every beat lost so too does she lose a little more of her control over it. Her already-twisted flowers begin to curl in upon themselves, petals once bright and bloody and brilliant becoming as black and dry as ash. The stalks begin to shrivel and wilt beneath the weight of their diseased bounty.
Isolt was not made to create life. With each second it slips further and further from her. And she wishes, on how she wishes her sister was here to keep the blooms alive for her.
But Danaë is carving the heads from her own tulips somewhere. And so Isolt sighs, and with that hollow, hungry look turning every edge of her face sharp again, she lets go. And she watches as the rot swallows the cardinal flowers whole, as it collapses into all that black-death-circle she has created around them. The poison taste lingers on her lips.
"Now," her voice is the soft hush of a funeral shroud being pulled over a dead girl's face, "you run. You run until you find a flower to take home with you. Run and find your mother, Elliana." And this, she knows, she cannot help her with.
Elliana will not find a tulip here in Isolt’s circle of death. And perhaps that makes her a little sad — but what does a young god of death know of sadness?
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
S
omewhere, Elli’s mother is sending a thousand prayers skyward for her daughter’s immortality.
She can feel it dying, the flower, but maybe this only masks the way the two of them should be dying, between Isolt and Elli, there should be death, there should be a body filling a grave that was dug so special, so precariously, as if it knows one day a rib cage will sprout roses, and daisies will fill eyes, and a heart will turn into a carnation. Flowers and death are not so unalike. She has wondered at night sometimes, what happens to the flowers that rot beside gravestones. Do they sink beneath the dirt, six feet under? And build a garden of dead things, miles, miles wide.
Isolt sighs.
And Elli thinks this is the first mortal sound she has ever heard bloom upon her lips.
She likes it, she thinks. It is the one thing, here in this moment that will cause her to seek the girl out again in due time.
Elliana knows that the flower is dying even before it begins to wilt, she knows it crosses over to that other side, to spring a bouquet for a dead lover and their darling. He will hand her a dozen cardinal flowers, dripping with decay. And she will smile back at him, a trickle of blood slides down from her eyes like teardrops.
She has never kissed anyone before, truly, mouth to mouth, but she wonders if there is as sharp a sting as the flower has left behind upon her lips.
Now.
Now what?
Now.
She listens like a little girl might listen to the sea before joining the sirens below its surface. She hangs onto every word, clawing until her fingernails turn bloody, so desperate to remember every syllable she speaks. “Okay,” she says, and when she speaks, there is a bitter aftertaste, like all the regrets the dead whisper to her in the night. And she is running before those regrets can hold her, because for all the poison on her tongue, Elliana is still very much alive.
I am looking for that sickness again. For the black sludge filling the flower-veins instead of water. For the specks of black crowning the edges of the petals. I am looking for something — anything — in the tulip fields that is imperfect. I am looking for the death that I know exists. And when I find it, it settles me in the way the colors, the life, the vibrancy never has.
I
solt watches her go. She is glad that she runs.
If she had not run, she might have gotten caught in the circle of blackened flowers that grows, and grows, and grows. She might have been overtaken by the rage that she suddenly cannot contain. The risen field mice that suddenly snarl like wolves and drag their broken bodies from the soil might have torn into her yet-unbroken skin, might have scarred her.
And she, the unicorn of death and dead things, is glad that this one thing has escaped her.
Her field mice come to her, turn their teeth against her own fetlocks. They gnaw at her coronets. They scratch their way up her legs.
And she lets them. For each nip of her own flesh is one less at Elliana’s. For each one that turns on her there is one less to chase after the girl. Her magic is a feral, hungry thing — it does not care who it consumes, only that there is something to fill the belly of it. She has always known it would consume her one day; to allow it to do so today is no different than to allow it tomorrow, or the next day, or a year from now.
So she watches Elliana run, and run, and run until she is out of sight. And only then does Isolt turn back to the tulips. Only then does every swing of her tail become the killing blow for another flower. Only then does she see the beauty of the rows that were once planted here, if only for the joy of destroying it.
Every lopped-off head of the tulips trails along in her wake, like a small army of death marching after her. Later she will give them to her sister, but for now Isolt is only looking for something to feed to her young army, to satisfy the hunger rearing tall and ugly in her belly.
