But then again, I don't know what I would be without it. And I don't think I want to know.
Sometimes, she likes to come to the edge of the forest and pretend she is standing on the edge of another world. From the shelter of the trees she watches the snow sparkle in the sunlight, broken up only by the snowshoe hares and winter foxes flashing quick as teeth in the open.
She watches now, as one rabbit leaps a second too late for the safety of its den.
And as the fox trots triumphantly through the snow, prize firmly caught in its jaws, the wind sings a warning down the spiral of her horn. You would be next, it promises with each step the fox takes that she is not following in pursuit. And when she grows bored of watching it live without fear, Isolt turns and drags her horn down the nearest tree until the bark cries and bleeds sap. The fox breaks out into a long-strided lope that carries it swiftly out of range, and another part of her heart feels like it is falling like a rotten leaf from a vine to watch as it does.
Maybe that is why she steps out from between the trees for the first time. Why her hooves cut through the unmarred snow like a knife, and all she thinks is how lovely it sounds to hear the ice crust shatter. The cold presses in against her skin and she welcomes it like the grim reaper welcomes the dying home.
She might have lain down and pretended to be dead then, entombed in an icy grave, if she hadn’t seen the other unicorn first.
Isolt points at it with her horn, lets that hollow bit of blood bone lead the way as she cuts across the prairie. Her war-drum heart races along faster than life inside of her chest, screams at a pitch that does not match the steady way she marches through the snow. A part of her hopes she looks like death coming to greet the other unicorn, hopes the girl will shiver and turn to run like the fox at the sight of her (so that she could chase her and make up for all the other things she should have followed to the grave.)
But instead they meet like shy wolves studying each other across the snow, circling like two things that have only ever known how to take and consume, to be the predator and never the prey. And Isolt aches to reach out and carve lines into her pale skin.
She feels more like a god than a unicorn when she lifts her head and studies her. Because she smells like the sea, like rotten, saltwater-sodden wood floating in the ocean, like flotsam caught in the tides. And even without having seen the sea before, Isolt knows it smells something like death.
“I think you should be dead.” Her voice waivers in the sunlight, like she wants nothing more than to turn back to the darkness of her forest (and to drag Avesta back there with her.)
She wants to ask her when she died, how she died, why she died, but more than that —
Isolt wants to ask her why she didn’t stay dead.
But instead she is silent, and only her eyes speak all the accusations her heart is singing like a whetstone to a blade.
@avesta
”wilting // blooming“
”wilting // blooming“
