And it pares my soul to the bone.
Isolt does not know why she followed her sister to the desert, when she could have (should have) walked beside her instead. Or why her heart settles into a death-tremor rhythm as she does, with each step feeling more and more like she was on a hunt for the one thing she knows she would never kill. But as the world turns from white to gold and still the trail of hoof prints leads on, she begins to wonder.
Isolt does not know —
But she wishes she did.
When she walks through the opened gates to the party, she thinks only how strange it is that so many horses should be pressed so closely together when beyond the city there is only space to be filled. And she thinks it stranger still that they should move in patterns her feet do not know how to make, guided by music she does not know how to listen to. While they twirl and laugh around her she is still — and only her heart quickens inside of her chest, starting its fever-beat anew. And when another horse bumps into her, laughing, head turning to apologize — every bit of laughter dies in his throat when he sees the look in her eyes.
She watches him go, and cannot help the way her tailblade seems to whine as it scores the air. Every moment she spends here has her feeling more like a creature and less like a person, a thing rather than a she. Maybe it has always been this way; maybe it is only the differences between dawn and day that has her realizing how much she does not belong in this world.
As the other stumbles away, she sees her. And every aching part of her wants to growl, and howl, and make all the noises of a pack of wolves at the end of their hunt. But she does none of those things when she walks up behind the sand-colored stallion; she only twists her horn until it quivers an inch from his skin. And before she speaks, she has to first choke down the snarl that is rising in her throat to make way for the words. “You should not tempt death so.”
And again she wonders why she wants so badly to drive the tip of her horn past his skin, down to the bone — when all he did was dare to stand too close to another unicorn.
