My teeth hurt with all the sounds crashing against them from the sea of my voice.
My jaw feels like rust and stone as I open my mouth again, and again, and again.
I am making a hundred sounds, a hundred sobs, and all that pours out is silence.
And the silence is black.
The unicorn does not know how to be alone. She has never had the chance to learn. In her dreams there are monsters running alongside her shadow like shorelines of bone, and petals, and whip-o-the-wills caging in the white-frothed river of her form. There lingers in her blood, and in her thoughts, the steady unending sound of her magic's roar like a storm that never breaks and only promises.
Outside her dreams there has always been her sister tangled with her, pressing horn and teeth against her skin as she whispers to the unicorn's soul instead of her ears. Their sides are always pressed together as they walk, hard enough that it feels like they are a monster of two heads and a single heart beating both sparrow frail and wolf strong between them.
And always, always, always, there is that wind-soft song echoing in her bones, and heart, and ears until she has learned that her soul has no room to sing a song of its own.
When she awakes, walking from the nothingness sea of her own dreams like a shell spit out from the tide, it is the touch of her sister that she first feels. It is not her own heartbeat that she hears when she tips her ears into the wind. All she can hear is the wolf-song of her twin's heart, and the wind singing though a horn that is not her own, and the trees moaning above their heads like creatures torn violently from slumber. Beneath it all her own body is just a leaf falling to the forest floor-- a sound of nothing caught in the roar of a snow squall.
There is no moment in which she thinks that she must untangle their legs, untwist the curls of their horn, and blink the dust of a million dreams that are not her own from the places were they cling like spiderweb to her black lashes. All there is the the sound of her sister's voice slipping into her spine like a fist and squeezing hard as a snake.
“You can never sleep.” The unicorn whispers as she stands on her own legs (are they her own? she cannot feel them) and smiles around her voice that she does not know how to describe the sound of. Her lips kiss her sister's cheek as she turns her gaze into the howling black-wood crying, crying, crying out for them.
It sounds like her dreams, her thoughts, her voice as it pours from her smile like it, it sounds--
Oh it sounds like every organ screaming inside her skin every hour, and every minute, and every second of every day.
She does not say yes, yes, yes I will run with you. She only is running before she is aware of the way her legs must move. There is only the feeling of something growing through her bones like a vine, and the vise like hold of her sister's every sound around her heart. There is only the howl, the cry, the fermented taste of rot crawling through the forest around them.
And she does not see that in each dead lead, and each cottage wall, and each dying bit of earth a flower blooms bright and bloody against the gray colorlessness of winter.
The unicorn, who only hears every step of her sister and every moan of the slumbering forest, does not know how to see anything that belongs to her and her alone.
@Isolt
