I S O L T
Most of the time, I do not know what I am looking for.
But I keep looking. And with every dying tree and rotting skeleton I come across, I ask myself, is this it?
She liked the way the forest sounded in winter. She liked the way the snow blanketed the trees in white, weighed them down like tethers, unable to free themselves from its hold. She liked the silence of a dead-and-hiding world, when the snow hares pressed close together in their dens and the only birds she saw were flying away from her, from the forest — never towards.
But even more, she liked the sound nature made when it gave up the fight at last.
The snapping of a limb echoes in the young-winter quiet, a sharp crackling sound that splits the world in two. Isolt stops to listen, and when she tilts her head like a wolf and peers into the forest it is like something in that dying tree speaks only to her. And whatever it is saying, makes her tail cut lines into the earth.
She does not feel like something living, when she turns deeper into the forest. Living things did not chase the sound of dying things the way she did, but knew to fly away like the birds. The thought makes her bare her teeth in an almost-smile, and her tail carves all the faster into the snow.
But this time —
This time, Isolt is not the first to find the waiting corpse staining the winter red.
She watches from the darkness between the trees, as the girl (gray, like the winter skies) digs away the snow shrouding the small corpse like a funeral veil. Everything in her is waiting, and wanting, and wondering — and if there is understanding, she does not show it. Isolt has never thought to bury the dead before. It has never been needed, not when the dead were only going to claw their way free later in the night.
When she finally drags herself out of the shadows, her tailblade whistles quietly through the snow like a promise of violence.
For one long moment, Isolt says nothing. She only looks from the stiffened, rent-open body to the masked girl holding it by the tail, then back again in silence. When she finally speaks it feels like she is chewing on the words, so that they come out slower than living things ought to speak. “Why are you disturbing the dead,” her voice is a whisper that does not lift the way a question should — it is only flat, like the words were dead before they left her lips.
In that moment, Isolt looks nothing like a unicorn should, has none of the innocence or incandescence of her twin. In fact — she looks more like the dead thing Bird pulls from the snow.
@maybird !
"wilting // blooming"
