I S O L T
She can feel her heart beating inside of her chest, as steady as it is slow, and oh, it feels wrong, wrong, wrong. Each beat echoes inside of an empty chest, each thrum of her pulse in her ears makes her feel like she’s caught somewhere between waking up and falling asleep, always stuck in that endless in-between world where there is no light, and no soul, to cast shadows.
She breathes in. The air is so cold it scrapes down her throat like solid ice. Her lungs feel like so many flowers struggling to bloom, roots freezing in the ground, leaves turning to follow the sun, pores opening to the air, and it serves a reminder:
Isolt is only as alive as a forest dying in the young-winter’s grip.
No —
Isolt is the young-winter taking the life of the forest for her own, with stolen petals filling up her lungs and a thousand hearts that are not her own beating against her ribs, pounding their fists against her diaphragm and begging her to set us free.
Sometimes she forgets that is wrong. When she’s too busy growing a wilted garden with her sister and kissing the dirt and rot away from the bone-cheeks of their creations, filling their empty eyes with daisies and knitting their joints together with vines. She forgets that to survive on stolen lives with a belly full of blood instead of clover is not really living at all, not in the way the rabbits and the foxes and the sparrows all live.
Not in the way others live, she thinks as the carcass hits the ground and leaves strands of gray hair pressed into the girl’s lips like rotten dandelion fluff. She licks her own lips and wonders what the fur tastes like, and if it would grant as many wishes as a flower.
And she wonders if wishes made on dead things would still come true.
There is no wind, no sound, no life in the forest surrounding them. There is only the carcass separating them, its head twisted limply around to stare back at her, mouth opened in frozen laughter (or was it a scream? Sometimes she cannot tell the difference.) And there is a moment that Isolt tries — heart beginning to pound blood beginning to stir and burn and whisper — to raise it.
Close your mouth, she tells it silently. Until you’re ready to use those teeth.
But it only stares unblinking, unseeing, unmoving in the frozen ground. And the cool winter air is barely enough to keep her rage from boiling over.
“All the dead belong to me.” She takes a step closer, and there is an edge to her voice that sounds as if she were speaking to the corpse as much as to the storm-colored girl. Another step, and the black-tipped tail twitches. Another, and she spies a bit of root wrapping itself around the broken neck, twisting it back into place. Another, and the dead thing lies evenly between them.
Isolt tilts her head to the side, regarding the girl quietly. Her mask was pushed up over her head now, and it surprises her just how green her eyes are (so unlike death.) She follows the sharp curve of the crow’s beak with her gaze. She does not need to imagine what it would look like with strands of wolf lichen filling its empty mouth. One step closer, and she knows her magic would be reaching for it, too, and for every broken-necked snowdrop hanging like corpses in her mane.
“And who are you, to tend to them instead?”
It sounds like an accusation, hanging from her teeth. And the dead thing laying between them begins to drool with all of her hunger filling its belly.
@maybird !
"wilting // blooming"
