isolt.
If only winter was as endless as death, as I am.
The island feels as though it were made for them.Or maybe they were made for the island, with their horns to shatter the dead-star mirrors and their tails to carve figurines from the pieces of glass left behind. There is no wind to make music through her horn here but oh, Isolt can hear it still. She tilts her head to listen to it, taps the flat of her tail blade along the glass-grass to its rhythm. She can feel the memory of it in her veins, tangled around that wolf-song beating alongside her sister’s heart.
And that monster inside of her begins to hum, as she steps over the broken pieces of an old world torn apart.
She walks through the skeleton of another world and never stops to wonder what it might have looked like before (and oh, it doesn’t matter). She sees only the beauty of the island as it is now, of the hollow shell of a land gone cold and lifeless. In every veil of frost she traces broken patterns with her tail, the only flowers she has not managed to kill. There is no life in them for her to take. And as snow limns her eyelashes like frozen tears and turns the world into one endless expanse of bone, she can hear the music over the aching.
There are no bodies in the ground whispering to her here. There is only the violence of a magic as wild and feral as herself, where the only gods exist in their spiraled horns and eyes that cry tears of blood instead of water.
She does not look at her reflection as she walks through the crystal maze with her twin, but if she did —
oh, if she did, she would see only a hundred pairs of monsters (always, they are in a pair) with the same cherry-red eyes promising violence, and bits of blood splashed across their bone-white skin. She might see them smile when she does, or hear their laughter echoing her’s when she finds one of those dead-stars lying in her path and begins to carve pieces from it.
She’s still watching the glass shatter as it hits the ground when she sees the other reflection. The not-monster, the unicorn who does not carry her horn like a sword by which to flay the world. She does not move as she moves, as a predator, as a god trapped in something else’s body —
Maybe that is why Isolt presses her teeth into her sister’s shoulder, and points after the other unicorn with that spiral of blood-colored bone. She does not try to be anyone other than the wicked thing carving the heart from world when she turns to follow after her. The crunch of her hooves in the snow (like breaking bones), the whisper of her blade across the crust (like the sigh of something dying), the way her eyes turn to blood instead of rubies, it all speaks to what she is even before the bits of mold turn the corners of the mirror black.
Her own face appears in the mirror behind her, sharp and bleeding. She watches as her reflection smiles, with teeth that are too sharp to be her’s (but oh, she wishes they were.) And as the color fades from that other-unicorn, her eyes only grow all the more red, all the more bloody, like a leech grown fat and greedy.
And only when the girl whirls around to face her and twists her horn to her’s, only then does she smile. Isolt steps closer, lays her horn against the other with a softness that does not match the furious beat of her heart. Like a kiss of violence, she pulls away.
“Yes.” There is winter in her voice, the crack of a snow-laden branch falling in the forest. She follows her horn with her eyes, watching as the wheatgrass and flowers begin to grow at last — her sister is still nearby, still watching, still waiting. The mirror seems more like a prophecy then, and everything in her is begging at once to fulfill it.
But she only bites down on her tongue and swallows, and fills the hunger with her own blood. When she speaks again, slower than a living thing should, the words sound like teeth gnawing at a bone. “Which do you think is better?”
And her horn swings like a noose between the crumpled body laying at the floor of the mirror, and back to the unicorn’s still-beating heart.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
