isolt.
I wonder —
what it would be like, to not be myself.
The forest is full of secrets. Secret whispers from root to leaf, flower to trunk. Secret bones, buried in holy groves where no one thinks to look, where no one visits to hear their groans. Secret princes with sun stains on their cheeks, wandered too far from the safety they were too naive to know they ought to cling to instead of run from.
Secret unicorns without hearts, who have no right to walk among the living but still do.
If the moon were any closer to the earth Isolt would find a way to carve out its secrets, too. She waits with her horn pointed towards it now, its light hanging a halo over the violence it promises with every bit of moonlight dripping like blood down its curved edge. She does not see the beauty in the moon, the same way there is no beauty in the way a creature that should have been born to elegance was made for only death and destruction.
Around her the forest is still murmuring its secrets in every shake of its branches, every patch of moonlight breaking through the leaves, every whisper of black wings in a black night. Frost blooms in hellebore-patterns down her spine, rot dances overtop the blossoms. And she is listening, watching, waiting — and her horn is drawing circles of the moon in the air all the while. Her legs tremble like things desperate to run, while everything in her begs her to stay, stay, stay and wait —
Wait —
She breathes in like a wolf on the hunt, inhales the scent of winter, and snow, and rot. Her lungs quiver beneath her skin like bones breaking apart. Her heart speeds up when it catches the pace of something ‘other’, something that moves faster than a frozen forest ought to move. In the wind she tastes life instead of death, something that does not belong in the forest and oh, it feels like her bones are only so many monsters coming awake with a sharp crack.
Wait for it —
She breathes out into the darkness, tail tapping out her heartbeat on the frozen ground. In her veins her blood is singing its song of violence, racing when she lowers her horn from the moon and pierces the darkness with it. She leads the way with it, as her walk turns to a run, and then a gallop, and then something furious tearing apart the trees. The song in her blood hums louder, and even when she gives into the madness all she hears in it is faster, faster, faster. Like blood rushing from a wound, like a wolf’s teeth snapping just short of a rabbit’s fur, it sings to her faster. And with every step carving sickle moons into the earth, and every cut her tail makes in every tree she passes, the forest bleeds.
She finds him deep in the forest, where the brambles grow wild and tangled and reach out like claws to scratch her skin. It should have been a sign to him, she thinks — he should have known he did not belong here where the wild things cared little for princes like him. She wonders if he can feel it, the darkness pressing in, the bones in the earth shivering like lonely things ready to welcome him home.
For a while she only watches him from the shadows, creeping in ever-tightening circles while her tail shush, shush, shushes him to sleep in the undergrowth.
“It will not help,” her voice is a whisper, a threat, a promise. Her horn catches on the moonlight when she balances at the edge of the descent and points it at his form. “You cannot hide.” How fragile he looks to her as she looks down upon him, curled up at the bottom of a ravine. How much like a meal, already caught and trapped, waiting to be consumed. How easy it would be, to add one more secret to the forest, one more corpse to the grave he lies so willingly in.
The wind shivering down her horn sounds like a whine, and everything in her that is both god and beast is begging to dive down into the dry stream bed with him. It whispers to her of all the ways she could fill the stream with blood instead of water, to strip him down to bones (because they are the only part of him that belong in the winter-dead forest.) The wolves in her bones are howling like a pack closing in around its prey.
But she only blinks, and takes a step back. Another, and another, while the fury in her chest reaches a fever-pitch and everything in her begs to unmake him. She takes another step back, until all she can see are his eyes looking back at her from the pit, and then —
she turns away.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
