I do not need to pretend.
I am already dead.
O
n either side of them the forest sits still and cold, as if life had been suspended in all the places their shadows touch. Isolt likes to image the trees are holding their breath as they walk by, waiting for them to pass with that sense of knowing all things of the forest possess when something terrible comes upon it. With so much nothing surrounding them, there is something aches her to be standing still with the forest. There is something in her that aches to bury her horn into the nearest frozen trunk, to twist and carve out its still-beating heart like a surgeon cutting away diseased bits of flesh. All the already-dead and dying things in the ground are whispering to her, and the sound of it makes her ache to pull up the roots of the trees with her teeth to reveal the bones they cradle in their grasp.
But Danaë does not stop. And Isolt does not ask her to.
She only walks with her nose pointed at her sister’s back like a wolf — and she does not look at the flowers that do not pretend to be dead, or the lichen that fills in all the gray spaces with color. She does not look at the way her twin can make life resist the dead-winter’s grip. Even when they hang heavy and low from the tree branches (so heavy she wonders how the branches do not snap beneath their weight, so heavy she finds herself holding her breath and wishing they would), even then she looks with empty eyes past them.
She does not look —
but she cannot stop seeing the colors.
And Isolt feels each one like the rumble of a storm, feels their sting like sunlight against her eyes. It makes her quiver with aching and wanting, makes her lungs tremble like the earth does when the bones are crawling free of it. And she wonders —
was there something trying to crawl free of her?
When they find the girl standing alone (eyes closed, snowflakes frozen on her blueing lips), her heart picks up a war-drum pace that threatens to strip the forest down to the sap frozen in its veins. And she thinks the thing crawling free of her is only the monster of her magic making its way to the outside. She can feel it scratching at her throat, can hear it beginning to roar and burn in her blood. Rot begins to mar the first of her sister’s poppies with black spots, its petals waxing so thin the moonlight shines through it. And if there is a part of her that stops to think no, not those, not her’s — it is drowned out by the wolf in the ground that is beginning to howl inside of her chest.
The girl’s pulse thrums there, right there, in the hollow of her throat — already it is rabbit-quick, and already Isolt can feel her own speed up like the wolf on the hunt after it. Her horn quivers, the tip of it dances in a circle when she swallows and drags her eyes like a scythe to the girl’s face.
Her sister presses in close to the girl, and she presses in close to her sister. The curve of her hip is cold when she presses cheek to skin to try and stop the tremors wracking down her spine. She presses in close and begs her heart to shush, shush, shush again.
But she cannot stop the monster in her from smiling with her lips, and speaking with her voice when it whispers, “would you like to be a dead thing?”
@isolt speaks
isolt
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