[P] only holy devotion can keep the devils away

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

Love.

A powerful, deceitful word.
One wrapped delicately with ribbon and lace, as sweet as arsenic.

And just as destructive. 

Her heart heart pines and aches within the bitterness of winter, though she could not and would not submit to the sheer weight of emotion that weighed so heavily upon her slender bones. Too often, she would swallow the swell of emotion that lingered within her throat, tasting the acidity of bittersweet memories and knowing well that her own fierce yet bristling heart could not be loved in any capacity.

She is covered in proverbial thorns; her heart and mind both guarded with the rusted barbed wire of weariness and reluctance. She had let him close, closer than all the others, enough to feel her bindings come loose in heated moments of vulnerability, tucked beneath a dense blanket of stars in the after sunset hours. 

Still, like that flickering candle, it burned within her like a flickering ember, burning low and slow in the very pit of her stomach, sating her with the faintest sensation of warmth and yet depriving her of the deep, searing burn she ached for.

She will burn. Burn, burn, slowly burn.

And smile all the while.

She is pure light and pale fire, electric and thrumming like a wire. There is still an ache sitting in the marrow of her bones. But it pretends it is not there, as a smile strikes her delicate features. 

The palomino walks through the island, walks and walks and walks. She sees nothing, nothing but foggy crystals, as if her future were forbidden. As if she were not allowed to see it. It swirls, mysteriously, selfishly. And that is when she realizes it.

Not, not fog, not the future—but mists—the past. And maybe this realization alone was enough to be the key to some door that had been locked. 

A piece clears and Elena sees something. It is familiar, though a part of her tells her it isnt, that this world is no longer her own. A valley of emerald carpet. There is the old willow, it’s thin branches fidget slightly beneath a summer breeze. The sunlight touches down in a way that is soft, yet you know there is warmth to be felt underneath its rays. There is a tree fort, not abandoned, not overgrown with moss, but it looks new. And there is a secret meadow, a field of gold. A cavern, that was always warm even when snow swept across the land. It all pulls into a lake that shines as clear as glass you might forget it was even there. And then upwards, up along the mountain landscape, and up the cascading water and she waits, she waits, staring into this mirror, she waits for the one thing, the one sound, that always sends her home. 

And she cant hear it, she cant hear that waterfall. She strains and strains, but all she sees is running water, diving over the cliffside into the worst of silences.

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them

[Thana]

Thana does not see the past, or the future, or this world in the glass corpses of the stars. For her there is only glass stained with black moss, and beasts with silver eyes peppering the darkness, and the thunderous cracking of those same corpses breaking into sharp shards at the force of her hooves as she runs. Each beast is following her with those silver eyes and their jagged jaws are open with dripping spit and roars that sound like come home, come home, come home, tangled with the thunder.

She turns, Eligos turns, and there is a gap jawed bear watching them with eyes pointing straight as a compass to the tip of her horn. They smile back with their own teeth flashing like caught and dead stars in the blackness of her lips. Their look is just as hungry, just as wanting, just as holy and full of grotesque glory.

They lift their head up and howl, and howl, and howl, just because there is no one here to tell them to be tame and be gentle. Here they are neither mother, or guardian, and there is no crown on their heads but the spiral bone of Thana’s horn that whispers death. They run, and snarl, and nip at the dead forms of stars because there is not a thing in this world to tell them no.

And if they are not home they do not realize it.

Together they come upon the mare, a blot of dead gold in their sea of black-glass and charred bones, with her head turned and straining to the corpse of a dead star. Thana smiles with curiosity. Eligos snarls with a hungering need. They step closer and their feet, even at a walk, are distant thunder.

There is no wind to whistle through her horn when she tilts her head like a wolf towards the mare. And there is no storm to deafen the cry of her tail-blade as she drags a war-field line across the dirt and glass. There is (as there always is) thunder in her throat when she inhales the smell of the sorrow.  

Through her smile she whispers, “What is it that you see?” as if it’s not the death of this golden mare flashing across the back of her eyelids like ribbons of lightning. Like she sees beginnings across the mare’s perfect spine instead of endings.




"Death hath no dominion"

@Elena

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

Elena, when she had been little, had been taught to sing and to dance and to love. It was easy then, it was so easy to live that way. Sing, a soprano voice echoing through an ancient valley. Dance, it was between sunflowers, feather light like sun beams. Love, it was something the golden girl did not need to be taught, and therefore she had been taught far too well. And so she loves too hard, too much, until she falls apart, singing words of despair and dancing like heartbreak.

“Why do you think you love them?” The dream man has asked.

Maybe she should have said it was only because love is what comes easiest.

Elena might have said once that for all of her weakness, there is one thing she does better than most:

Survive.

But now she is not so sure.

She does not feel like herself any longer. She doesn’t recognize the face that greets her in still waters, int he mirrors. She doesn’t recognize the very beat of her own heart. She is hollow and quiet and broken. She shies from others where once she flung herself into the worst of it. She pulls away, tending to wounds that may never heal. It all becomes so much, too much,

Foolish, perhaps, but she cannot hold out against it. Despite the fear in her throat and the million things that tell her she should turn from this, she succumbs to it. Despite the logic and the sense that rage in her mind, she merely turns herself over to the wave of emotion that rises in her throat.

She can feel her when she comes. It is a wild storm raging inside Elena’s chest, and the golden girl leans into it. It feels so good to be out of control, the lightning strikes her heart, the thunder rumbles her skin, and the wind shakes away all her torment, leaving chaos in its wake. She closes blue eyes against the force of it.

“I see plenty, but hear nothing,” she finally says, her voice low and soft. The words taste bitter in her mouth, like cold metal. Confession blooms like a bloodstain on her chest. When she opens her eyes again, they are bruised, the curves of her flaxen mane curving around her jaw, wildflowers in her hair. “Until you came,” Elena says and she turns to them. There is no room for fear in blood, even if there should be. Elena above most should know death, but she cannot see it through the cloud of rain that erupts from the storm in her emotions. Elena walks towards her, she is not herself, the magic of home has left her on this island, and only disarray has been strong enough to stay behind. She reaches out and touches her dark shoulder before pulling back as the empath’s body erupts. And she thinks this is death, this is the loneliness of rotting into nothing. She feels as though her flesh is wilting away from her body, she is just muscle and veins, and then bones, and then dust. And then her body comes back and she is once more golden, but she feels rebuilt in the likeliness of the unicorn.

And Elena cannot remember what it is like to be born—she only knows what it means to be created.

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them

[Thana]

Mortals, or things born, cannot hear as well as made-things and she tries not to hate her for it. She tries not to bare her teeth, and clack her jaw, and pull the hate out of the mare’s marrow. It rides her hard, harder than the hunger, when a touch brushes lightly across her shoulder. Her teeth grind against the roar echoing in her belly.

Eligos has no such hesitation and his snarl sets the bones-of-stars to trembling like deadwood in a hurricane. He scrapes his claws against the glass-shards.

Screech, like a blade on a gravestone, screech.

Thana does not smile at him, or the mare, or do anything but lift her blades up in warning. “As all born things do, you do not listen close enough.” There is more snarl than sound in her voice, more tap, tap, tap of a monster at a door than greeting. But Thana does not ask to be let in when she drags her horn down the center of the mare’s face before pressing hard against her lips. Hard enough to cut. Hard enough to maim.

Her hooves make more thunder on the bones when she steps closer. “I could teach you.” The flat of her tail taps against the ground, asking in a way that her horn never does. Her entire body screams with the language of monsters, of unicorns, of things no feeling can fathom. She screams of hunger as much as she screams of wrath, and war, and devastation.

Thana hungers.

And the sound of it lives in her teeth when she moves to drag them across her own lip until she bleeds. Drip, like a promise at the tip of that blade on a gravestone, drip.



"Death hath no dominion"

@Elena

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

Aletta. Marcelo. Jay…

Their names start listing off in her mind again.

Ori. Valario. Lilli…

Again.

Aletta. Marcelo. Jay…

Ori. Valerio. Lilli….

Once they start they cannot stop.

And those names that once filled her with such joy, such love, such hope, are all crushed beneath the weight of the woman’s emotions before and the strangeness of the island. And a snarl finds perches on her lips, before she rattles them off again.

Aletta. Marcelo. Jay…

Ori. Valerio. Lilli…

Each accompanied by a screech of claws against glass and feels the broken pieces scratching and ripping her apart. “I only hear the sound of myself,” she admits, thinking the way her heart is beating like a war drum, and her blood rushes like a spear through the air. She is suddenly all battles and bruises.

A cut drags its way against her face, hard enough to cut, hard enough to leave a mark, but this island is strange and when Elena awakes tomorrow there will be no scar. But for now it settles against her lips like a secret.

She could teach her—to hear again—instead of just listening to the storms of unicorns and the battle in herself, and those names, those wretched names that she is finding she hates more and more. (There is still a piece of her unmarred by the stranger, that says ‘no, no, you love the way they sound.) And Elena says she cannot hear anything anymore. And that waterfall just keeps plundering off a cliff into silence. And she opens her mouth to speak, and she cannot hear her own voice, but her lips form the words: “So teach me.”

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them

[Thana]

All of them, these pale and fragile creatures of this world, are so eager to line up upon the cliff like it’s an altar instead of stone above the sea. They are all so willing to cast their pearl-and-dead eyes to the clouds and make shapes and stories from storms and rainbows. There are a hundred warnings in this world-- gods that smite instead of bless, monsters that wear teeth shaped into hearts and wishes, an island that devours and builds graves in the shape of adventure.

Thana does not need to wonder what the lambs see when they line up for the blade to rejoice in the taking of their lives. She does not need to understand the pulse of their adoration, or the misery in their tears, to spill oceans of both.

All she needs to do, all she has ever needed to do in his world, is open up her mouth and eat, and eat, and eat, until the world is nothing more than bleached bones and magic left to fester and sicken.

Magic purrs in her blood like a tiger at the birthing ground when the mare stands like a lamb while a horn cleaves lines down her face. Lamb, the magic sings, lamb. And Thana, who is god and blade and storm, steps closer to the thing laying upon the cliff and dreaming shapes into the clouds. She strikes as the lightning does as it races towards the oak in the meadow who thinks itself so very, very ancient.

The oak burns. It will always burn eventually.

Her tailblade whispers along the shell of the mare’s ears, like the teeth of a lover instead of a weapon. Thana presses their noses together, their lips together, their teeth when she pushes harder against the golden lamb begging to die. Over and over again-- blade and ear, blade and ear.

“And what do you hear now?” Over and over again, like the snake devouring its own tail.




"Death hath no dominion"

@Elena

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

The first time she died was alongside her mother. The moment she took her last breath, Elena felt all the air leave her own lungs. Her mother killed her without knowing, killed that first Elena, the baby Elena, who knew only flowers and sunshine and love, who saw war not for what it was but a place far, far away, like a story. Lilli tore the next Elena and rebuilt her anew. And for that, Elena will be eternally grateful. And Elena in her foolishness, took the life of the next Elena to save Lilli.

It should not be surprising.
There was so little she would not do for her cousin.

She wonders, if only briefly, would she die here? In the silence of everything aside from the chaotic drumming and thunder that the unicorn brings? This cant be the only thing, this cant be it, she could not live like this, with all of this destruction, this hunger in her soul. Oh this cannot be everything.

Elena can only hear the sounds created by her and her alone, she thinks if she spoke she may not even hear her own voice, though she knows she can still speak. And then she is against her and Elena feels something like horror fill her blue eyes, but she cannot move, just succumbs to it. And for the first time Elena wants to destroy the world and what rests inside it, not in anger, grief, revenge, but for the sheer joy of chaos.

And what do you hear now?

“I hear,” she says, breathing hard. And she looks at the image again. “Waterfalls,” she growls before turning to the unicorn, feeling such rot, such chaos building inside her. No, falling, like water, down into her belly, her soul. She sees their faces all of them, staring back at her, telling her to stop, to stop listening. “No,” she snarls back at them. Blue eyes turn from them before she launches a golden leg through the mirror, through the glass. “I think I preferred the silence,” she says before looking back at her leg, bloodied, the crimson stands stark against alabaster, shards of glass stick out at odd angles. She dares to look back at the unicorn, even though there is still terror hidden in the ice of her eyes. “This was only our first lesson.” She says and she escapes into the mirrors.

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them

[Thana]

All the lambs, in the last moment before the blade runs across their throat, start to discover the taste of rage. They discover it as only innocent things marked for the blackness do. Thana can, and has always been able to, see the flash of it in their eyes like a young sun that burns so hotly that it burns out in all the time it takes to blink. Had she known more than hunger, and need, and ache, and wrath as implacable as the moon, she might have wondered at the fury in a lamb's gaze.

But a blade has no need for wonder. A blade does not feel more than skin, and sinew, and blood gathering in the chips left from a million cuts. And so Thana, who really is more blade than unicorn, does not wonder at the terror below the brief and holy flash of hunger.

It’s the hunger of wrath and rage that marks a lamb for death. Only things made to die, only things waiting to die can look like that.

It’s not a waterfall that Thana has been waiting for the mare to hear. It’s not silence that whispered on the end of her blade as she dragged it in kisses across the mare. Even in the darkness, even in her darkness, there is no sound of silence.

Thana had been waiting for her to hear the sound of a hundred things dying all at once in the arching shadows of their bodies as they met. She had been waiting for the mare to hear the coo of rot, the holy lament of a mirror as it turns brittle, the bleat of a hundred lambs urging the golden mare to sing them a eulogy and call it a story.

Still Thana is not surprised when the mare’s terror takes her as a current takes a rotten leaf. She is not surprised when the terror pulls her away from what only a thing born could call a lesson.

And she is not surprised to feel a smile curl across her lips, and the echoing howl of Eligos in the distance, as she steps into the mirror after the mare and starts what will not be the second lesson but the last.




"Death hath no dominion"

@Elena