isolt.I wonder if she knows — if any of them know. When they look at me, do they see only a unicorn? Or do they see too the monster hiding beneath my skin, the one sharpening its claws on my heart?
I am not sure why I find the thought unsettling. I know I am a monster, a thing-which-should-not-exist. I know it as surely as I know the sound of my sister’s heart beating next to my own.
So why, then, do I hope others do not see it, too?
I am not sure why I find the thought unsettling. I know I am a monster, a thing-which-should-not-exist. I know it as surely as I know the sound of my sister’s heart beating next to my own.
So why, then, do I hope others do not see it, too?
There is not a moment that goes by that Isolt does not find herself searching for something. She looks for it now in the pulse thrumming just at the corner of the other girl’s jaw, in every jagged edge of the leaf marking her brow. When she tilts her head back she counts every invisible vertebrae lining her back and the ribs that wrap like a mother’s arms around her chest, protecting the one organ that seemed always determined to run away, away, away. It takes effort to not let herself be the one carving it free.
Her horn quivers upon her brow, ready to make the first cut. Isolt knows she could do it, knows all she needs to do is lower her head to the space between the first and second rib, knows all it would take is one quick thrust, a slash, a twist (she does not know how she knows — a part of her is afraid to ask.) The bloodlust rises like a wave inside of her, sudden and forceful, bearing down with all the weight of a god upon her spine.
She closes her eyes against it, and sees her own hunger and ache spiderwebbed across the backs of her eyelids in red. It’s beautiful, she thinks, in the way that lightning is beautiful: in its promise of violence, blooming in arcane patterns that rend the world in two.
When she opens her eyes again — slowly, slower than a living thing should, counting only the heartbeats fluttering beneath their skins and not the seconds that tick by — she wants to trace her horn down the girl’s brow and ask her why she is marked like a forest. She wants to know which world loved her so because she knows it was not this one, it was not her forest, and because she wants to travel to that other world and unmake it. She wants to carve lines of rot into every forest not her own, until every tree collapses beneath her hooves and an army of dead things claw their way atop them.
But instead she pulls away from her, and begs all the wolves howling inside of her to be still.
“Hello.” The greeting makes her feel almost-normal, even when it hangs stale and broken from her teeth. And yet when she offers her name, she thinks it would have been better had the girl asked what she was instead of who. “I am Isolt.”
All the wolves inside of her are still yipping and snarling and rushing against her throat. Isolt swallows them down, all of them, and feels them turn their teeth and their fangs upon her heart instead. It hurts, oh, it hurts to not close the distance between them with a flash of her blood-red horn, to not pluck the question from this foreign girl’s skin like a violinist plucking chords from the strings of his instrument. She wants to make music of her bones, and art of her blood. She wants it more than death.
But she can still see Vespera watching her, watching over her flock — and she knows she is the wolf the goddess is there to protect her sheep from.
Can the other girl see it, too? Does the lamb feel fear before the slaughter, or do they not even see it coming?
She swallows again, and asks, “who are you?” But the wind whistling through the spindle of bone on her brow sounds like it is asking a question of its own.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
