isolt.There has always been a monster inside of me, gnawing at my heart like a wolf at a bone. I can feel it now, hollowing out my chest like it's making a den of me. Sometimes I wonder if I have ever been anything but a temporary skin for something terrible.
The swamp was full of dead things.She could smell them all rotting, could feel the way the air hung thick and stagnant against her skin like the breath of some terrible beast. She could feel the way the swamp was pulling everything apart, bit by bit, bone by bone, drawing out the marrow and the sap and the life. It curls around her, as tangible as the vines that creep across the sodden ground.
Each time she steps over them she hears the soft death-lament singing softly in her wake. It chants in time to her own poison heartbeat, each throb, each step, each lyric a new death. The fog gross thicker, sickly-sweet, hanging like a funeral veil she drapes over the swamp. And she, she is the grim reaper, the shadow, the beast moving between the trees and wading deeper into the tangled wild.
And yet —
For each leaf that falls like a sinner bowing at her feet, there are dozens more whispering overhead. For each flower that wilts and blackens against her lips there is always another that brightens once her shadows moves past. Everywhere she looks Isolt sees only the trees sucking up the poisoned swamp-water like wine, growing tall despite the way their branches sag and their bark turns sallow and soft.
Everything in her is screaming at the sight of it. The wolves in her bones are howling and screaming and begging for her to devour, begging for to consume the forest whole so she might sate her hunger with it. Her tail lashes like a whip behind her, gouging scars into the nearest water-gum trees.
Her reflection, when she looks into that rotten black water, does not look like a blood red unicorn. She looks like only a shadow of a girl with a bit of bone weighing heavy on her brow. Every day it feels more like a weapon than a weight, every day she aches to see the hollow curls of it filled.
And today, like every other day, she swallows down her heart when it leaps into her chest.
And she turns away, and presses deeper into the swamp. She presses on, until dead leaves and moss tangle in her hair and mud stains her cheeks. She presses on, and with each step she feels more and more like a wolf wearing the clothing of a sheep, the grim reaper wearing the life of the swamp and pretending she is not strangling the life out of it as surely as the rotten water is drowning it. She presses on, until she sees the form of another moving like a ghost between the trees (and everything in her blood begins to sing at the sight of it.)
And with the silent forest pressing in all around her, she follows after him like a wolf following the scent of blood.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
