ISOLT
Maybe I have.
I tell myself these memories are not my own, that they belong to the dead. But sometimes, oh sometimes it is so hard to separate their thoughts from mine. Sometimes I wonder who I am — wolf or horse? Monster or girl? Mortal or god?
Maybe I am all that and nothing.
Isolt sees the flowers blooming as she passes them by — how could she not? Already she thinks that they are to be the most beautiful sight in the world, the loveliest gift a twin monster might offer its other half. All that red, stark and bloody against the winter frost, paper-thin petals limned with ice. Red and white, just like them. Cold and profane, just like them. Something alive growing overtop something long past saving —
just like them.
They run together like dead things risen from their graves, like they have flowers and moss filling their chests instead of hearts and lungs. The garden feels as though it were made for them tonight, everything black and ominous and dusted with frost. It felt like something dying, something frozen and lonely and so silent she can hear each thud of her twin’s heart. In the darkness she counts every petal coming to life, and every beat of the wolf-song rushing through their veins instead of blood.
And upon each one of them she makes a wish. She wishes that the bodies in the ground would go back to sleep (or at least stop crying, it is the crying she cannot stand), she wishes that her sister’s flowers might live forever (even when the winter is pressing in, hard and hungry and sharp-toothed) — she wishes, wishes, wishes for a hundred feelings other than this hunger that twists itself like a knife through her belly.
Isolt does not know what it wants, does not yet know what it takes to satisfy the black monster of her magic — but oh, how she wants to. Maybe then she wouldn’t have to wonder if the howl rising in her throat belonged to her or the wolf bones laying forgotten in the dirt. Maybe then she could lay down to sleep and dream about something — anything — other than the dead clawing free from the earth and consuming every living creature left in the world.
And as she runs on and on, as they twist around frozen hedges and sprint down beaten dirt paths, she is looking for it. Isolt is hunting, and each step she takes is more graceful and deadly than the last. In every dead leaf and bloody flower she expects to find it, the answer to the question she does not have the words to ask. That wind-song they both move in time to is calling her closer, closer, closer —
She doesn’t tell her sister when it’s time to stop (she knows, she thinks she must already know.) The garden smells like death, and in it is the answer, the reason she cannot sleep, the end of their hunt. In the ground is the thing calling out to them.
Isolt is moving towards it even before she understands what it is. “Here,” she whispers, lowering her head. Her breath freezes in the air, her lungs tremble like dying flowers, and she buries the tip of her horn into the snow like a spear.
“Do you hear it, sister?” Her voice is soft, the sound of death creeping between her father’s slumbering flowers. The body in the ground is stretching and yawning at the sound of it.
And when she pulls away and says, “it wants to be free,” her magic feels like ice crawling down the bend of her spine. She steps back and presses her side to her twin’s, hard enough it feels like their skin might finally break so they might bleed together like watercolor at last.
Isolt shivers, and it has nothing to do with the cold.
@danaë ❁
"wilting // blooming"
"wilting // blooming"
