widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
T
he coyotes are telling her that this is the way of the hunt, a lone broken one to lure the foxes and the vultures in. This is the cruelty of the world, the cycle of the snake eating its own tail, the brutality of being a thing made of weaponry and magic. Still her heart trembles in her chest, a sparrow's death knell, a bell-chime of an eulogy. Her magic, her hunger, her form, all shiver as a lightning shivers when she turns away from the music. Her fevered skin misses the coolness of the stone immediately. It misses the silence of death when music filled it in the cracks not yet fat with blood.
“The music does not sound like any one thing.” The tilt of her head as she considers the scars painting maps on his skin (ones she was made to read) is more wolf and elk than unicorn. The flare of her nostrils and the lick of her lips as she tastes him is almost profane on the sweet expression of a girl trying not to be the monster her blood is telling her to be.
There, just below his throat, see the thrum of his heart. The space between the first and second rib is the most fragile, the quickest entry point by which to unmake him. Twist your horn as a fox twists a hare's neck when it sinks into his skin. Go for the hollow just above his eyes to show him how the see the universe beyond this one. Kill him.
“It is too many different notes woven together to sound like anything but life.” This is the way, the coyotes say again, of the hunt. She steps close enough to see the many shades of pink making up his scars. “Can you hear it?” And on the wake of the asking she wonders if she should touch him below his eye or between the first and the second rib. She wonders if it would be called a kiss or a war, a caress or a wound.
She wonders and--
Isolt comes to them then and the coyotes in her bones set to yipping and howling at the violence in her eyes that promises a banquet to come. Her mouth waters and her jaw sets to aching with the need to gnash her teeth like whetstones and steel. Everything in her, every coyote and stag and sand monster, bellows for her to join her sister and hunt as predator packs hunt.
Everything in her screams to devour, and taste, and grow a garden from the gore left in the wake of them.
When she swallows down the salivating wild-dogs and sighs “sister”, like a prayer instead of the name mine, she has to close her eyes against all the rage rising in blooms of pink against the belly of her bone-white skin.
And still the music goes on. Like life it goes on always hungry, always beautiful, and heavy with the bitter-sweetness of brutality.
{ @Isolt @Vercingtorix "speaks" notes: <3
