widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
T
he winter, newly turned as it is, has already taken with the death of the day some tree-hearts. The snow-crystals have turned to dark-frost in the rising moonlight. Each new death hangs on her tongue like a bit of seed from a fruit too bitter to swallow. The taste lingers and consumes every thought she might have had that was not death, or dying, or lamenting leaves so soft that only she can hear them beneath the howling wind of a coming squall. Her steps turn into cracking roots and her heart into frozen water trapped in the roots of of rib cage. The hollow spiral of her horn becomes a gnarled branch choked out by ivy, and weed, and rot. In her belly there is a dead rabbit begging for clover. In the space behind her eyes, where there should be music and the dreams of a young-unicorn, there is a bear cub that was too frail to wait for spring. In her bones there a hundred worms and dead lotus petals shivering beneath the cold that has become eternal for them.
But in her wake, in the places where her hooves leave sickle moons in the snow and her shadow breaks sharp against the pine shadows, flowers hang from the new-dead trees in all the colors she knows how to name. Lichen spreads out across a fallen, half-decayed branch, in arrays of green, and gold, and a purple darker than her mother's eyes. There are red poppies blooming strangely from a gathering a holly leaves. The snow blooms with wounds of color instead of shadow and blood.
Behind her Isolt walks, close enough that their shadows become as wide and fearsome of the pines in the moonlight. And beneath them there are bones trembling against the frozen dirt like blade begging to cut their way into the marrow of the world, and the sun, and the air fresh enough to taste of pine and sugar snow. Her thoughts, what should be unicorn thoughts, are fat with their sorrowful screams and bloated with their frosted tears.
She tries not to listen. She tries to drown them out and grow flowers instead of corpses. She tries, but they are like the weeds that choked the gnarled branch to death, or like the winter flakes falling heavy enough to blanket the world in nothing but bone-white. She is dying with the forest in the bone deep cold. She is not a unicorn anymore.
She is..
She is...
She is smiling as she finds the child (or at least what she thinks the shape of a child is supposed to look like, what she is supposed to look like). Her teeth are brighter than her skin, paler against the blushed fragility of her lips. “You shouldn't be here.” The words are harsher than her wavering smile, colder than the bloody sun-warmth in her eyes. They are true, true in the way things made are true (she is too young, too holy, too god-like to lie).
The unicorn steps closer and brushes her nose against the girl's brow in some mess of a kiss and an anointment. “Only dead things belong in the winter forest.” And when she lowers her horn to tap, tap, tap it against the girl's chest, it is clear that only one of them has a heart that beats in melody of spring.
{ @Isolt @Elliana "speaks" notes: <3
