The dead are sleeping. It is a restless sleep, one I know well. They toss and turn, grumble and groan, trembling within the stone and roots encasing them. Dreams of running and breathing reverberates in their empty skulls, visions of grass and sky flickering in their empty eye sockets.
The dead are sleeping, but their dreams are mine.
T he darkness feels colder than it should. It curls like a finger down her spine, breathing down the back of her neck, hanging like a funeral shroud down her sides. It feels hungry, in the way that winter is always hungry, in the way a graveyard that has been abandoned is always hungry.
All this space —
All this room for new gravestones —
Isolt wonders how long it would take to fill it all. How many dead she would have to wake, just to lead them here to their stagnant graves. Already she is imagining how they would look — she blinks and she can see them there, lined up neatly on either side of the narrow path she walks now, bodies curled into a bow as she passes. The thought carves a smile through her cheeks, and it is a wonder that her teeth still flash brightly in the darkness.
Like bones left out beneath the moonlight.
She drags her tail blade along the cavern floor behind her, tracing arcane patterns even she does not recognize through the dust. The sound it makes, bone against stone, is like wailing; it swells up, up, up to fill the caverns, twists through the chambers of her heart like wind whistling through the caves. It is the only part of her that is singing, or dancing, whispering to the dead in nightmares and terrors, filling their sleep with all the violence of a hundred bloody deaths.
The stone is cool and damp against her skin, when she turns and traces her muzzle down the walls. When she licks her lips it tastes like copper and dust and mold. She imagines it to be blood soaking the walls, and she is thankful there is not enough light to ruin the illusion. But ahead of her a light is flickering into existence, flames lapping at the darkened walls.
Isolt presses on hungrily, everything in her straining for the darkness, begging to bring whatever life clings to the fire down to its knees, to submission. Her tail flicks faster along the cavern floor, wails turning to howls as her walk turns to a dance.
The corridor suddenly opens into a rounded room, a single torch burning defiantly in its bracket on the wall. Its light does not fall against faces, or skin, or eyes —
but the room is not empty, not truly. The walls live and breathe with a thousand scriptures and ancient arts scrawled across it, alive and dancing in the flickering firelight. And where the caves she had passed through were only dark and twilight-grey, the room she stands in now is bursting with colors.
There is a scene unfolding on the walls, a group of men armed with spears chasing after a dark shadow. She follows it around the room, as they sprint through forests and deserts and lakes in pursuit of the beast. A story is printed in an ancient, forgotten language above each scene.
But she does not care what the words mean, or the purpose of the picture story.
No, when Isolt steps forward and drags her nose down a line of red painted over one of the warrior’s throats, she only wonders what happened to the mens’ bones, after the beast was finished picking its teeth with them.
oh, pick us up, we're these bundles
wrapped in shrouds of muscles
—
Teak would not follow her into the caves.
The cheetah did not hide his irritation. When she first stepped into the shadows he lashed his tail, chirruped at her in agitation, pushes his whiskers back and showed her his teeth. Aster laughed at him, but lovingly, the way she used to at her brother. And then she said, “Don’t wait for me,” though she knew that he would, and turned and walked further and further into the dark.
She wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Only something different, only something new. Here in the belly of the mountains, it smelled of the sharp tang of minerals and the cool musk of clay. It was not as quiet as she thought it would be, and not as warm. There was almost always the sound of water, often only a faint trickle, like the background of a dream.
Aster had found the picture-cavern by its torchlight. More than anything, she wondered who lit it - more than wondering who painted the figures on the walls, or when, or why. The horses of Novus seemingly loved to paint, loved to mark paper and walls and one another’s skins. And it didn’t matter to her whether the words marked above the images were ancient or forgotten or made up entirely, because nobody ever taught Aster how to read.
Still she had spent some time there, telling herself the story. And then she had gone on, and found only the musk of the caves, and bats, and darkness, until she turned back.
And as she winds her way back she hears the scrape, scrape of something like metal or bone against the floor or the walls. For a moment she listens, her nose curled toward her chest, her heart beating beating beating like a rabbit running running running down narrower corridors than these. Then she hears the hoof steps, a pattern against the stone, and she starts forward again.
The unicorn reaches the torch-lit cavern, the picture cavern, before Aster does. So Aster has the luxury of standing in the darkness for a moment, simply watching, her golden eyes luminous in the semidarkness. There is no hiding her for long - she is pale as a ghost - and at last she steps into the mouth of her entrance, across the room from the other girl.
Curiously, head tilted like a bird, she watches the unicorn touch one of the figures.
“Do you think it’s true?” she asks, and gestures lightly toward the wall, where all the throats are slashed with red.
I am dreaming with them, the dead. They dream of living again, of their deaths, of their last breaths. I can feel the scrape of the creature’s teeth at their throats over, and over, and over again, the feeling of their blood running down their chests. Again and again I see it, the same scene neverending.
They do not know yet that they could live again, a new life, that they do not need to be trapped to the memories of their death.
But I will show them.
The dust of the cave wall tastes like rust against her lips, like dried blood, like ancient death. She drags lines through it in place of kisses, blurs the painted warrior shapes because Isolt has never known how to add to a story, or how to make art, or how to paint a story —
she knows only how to end it.
In the lines she traces over the paintings feels like walking through the belly of the story itself (like a sword, like a dagger thrust beneath the ribs, ready to tear every gut and organ out.) She is walking among them as they chase after the beast painted in shadows, she is watching as their throats are torn open like second bleeding smiles. She is the beast who settles down to gnaw the marrow from their bones.
Her eyes slip closed as she watches. Hunger gnaws at her belly, calling out for their ancient deaths but all she can see is darkness, and the spears of those hunters reaching for her with retribution hanging from the tips of them.
She does not notice the other girl, not until she pulls away from the cavern painting. In another life she might have reminded her of Danaë — of a bone-white specter, the other half to a darker shadow, hovering on the precipice of death. As though waiting to lead her somewhere (but not to death, she knows — death is already here. She is already here.)
But today she only looks like the bones she has seen in the story in her mind, and her gold is the ichor of gods-blood dripping down their teeth. The scraping of her tail blade begins to sound like the hush, hush, hush her sister whispers to her at night when she cannot sleep.
Isolt does not wonder what the living were thinking when they painted the stories across the walls. To her there is no hidden meaning in the figures, only a warning: the warning all mortals must yield to, when their time has come. “Their death,” her voice whispers across the space separating them.
She turns back to the wall then, and the figures that race in circles upon circles across the room. The tip of her horn tap, tap, taps against each painted warrior as she follows them.
”Have you come to learn the story?” And in the hush, hush, hush of her blade still painting death after death on the ground in her wake, there is the promise that Isolt could teach her, too.
oh, pick us up, we're these bundles
wrapped in shrouds of muscles
—
They both look a little like they’re in a trance as the light from the single torch flickers over the cavern. Their shadows dance wildly, clinging to their feet, but the unicorn is slowly tracing and unmaking the painted figures and Aster is watching her as keenly as an owl. Here, unlike most other places, she doesn’t think about using her magic; everything already feels slow, slow, slow and strange. Like they are two ancient things caught in amber, another story on a wall somewhere.
Only when the strange girl speaks does the white mare twist an ear back, and tip her head to the side.
“That’s an old story,” Aster says, with a little shiver of a shrug that is almost dismissive.
Death, she thinks, is the oldest story there is - except for birth. Her father had known that cycle, back when he was a god (she wonders if he is a god again, in whatever world they have gone to), and had told it to her when her legs were long and thin and her wings were only a fledgling’s. Back before she was alone.
And it is not a story that frightens her. This girl does not frighten her either, and the way Aster’s golden eyes watch the arc of her tail-blade is more like a cat watching a cat than a bird watching a snake. The antlered girl doesn’t take a step, but she rocks back on her golden hooves with a little smile on her face.
When she reaches out with her magic to the torch, it slows so much that the light is almost steady, and even their shadows stop dancing and fall still at their sides. Now the only sound is the scrape of the other girl's tail on the floor of the cave.
“But you can tell it to me,” she says to the unicorn.
The dead are sleeping. I can feel their bones beneath our hooves, turning over in their dreams of hunting and being hunted. They are running in them, running in circles like the endless story that goes around, and around, and around the room. And as I follow it with my horn I know —
All dreams end, and all things wake eventually.
Beneath her tail a crack blooms across the painted wall. It spreads like a wildflower reaching for the sky, stretching out its stalk further, further — splitting into leaves, and petals, and more stalks upon which more flowers bud.
Isolt watches it spread, feeling caught between the lines of it as it splits the story in two. On one side a hunt, endless, perpetual; life that is running, and running, and running because to stop is to starve. And on the other side, a death that repeats itself over and over again, as if each warrior to toss their spear at the great beast’s eye is foolish enough to think their ending will be different than all the others that came before.
It will not be different. The girl is right — it’s an old story, one she knows the answer to already.
But knowing its end does not make the rest of it any less exciting.
It feels like a terrible thing, a mortal thing, to care any less of the bones buried somewhere here in these caverns. And she is thinking of the bramblebear again — for he, too, was an old story the castlekeeper had whispered to them, and still she and her twin had written him a new ending that night in the woods — and the way his hunger had felt great enough to consume an army sent after him but still (but still!) had bowed to her’s.
Death may be an old story. But it was not the end of the story, not when she was there to add pages upon pages of risen things blinking the sleep from their daisy-eyes.
“Maybe there is another story you would like to hear,” she rolls an eye back to look at the girl when all the flickering stops and the flame stands tall and still upon its torch. The magic makes her heart beat a little bit faster as if it is both in love with and in defiance of it. Somewhere buried in the loam of her an owl is pecking at her liver, and a wood mouse is burying down in her stomach, and a sparrow is beating its rot-and-spore wings against her lungs.
She blinks them back. “There is a story that comes after this one,” and again her blade scrapes against the paintings smeared across the wall.
