WHAT IS DEAD AND WHAT WILL LIVE SHARE THE SAME BED.
tomb-cradle: another definition of Stigma.
Her blood-eyed stare is unnerving.
I can’t say for sure what it feels like to watch her watching me, to trace her stare down the curve of my throat. The sensation of her stare is not something that I can compare to anything else – not a strangling vine or a prowling cat, though it is somehow similar to both. There is a way that it makes my skin crawl, though I do not quiver away from her, even when the tip of her horn dances close to my skin and my nerves burn with the urge to run. It is a violent point, and she is so close, and there are haze-heavy memories that linger like a sharp edge in the back of my mind. I only remember bits and pieces of that lifetime, but I think that the thing I remember most viscerally, maybe even as viscerally as I remember him -
is the way that I died. I could point out the place on this newborn body where the sword would have to enter to mimic it. In my second lifetime, I was always a bit jumpier around sharp objects; even when I clenched my own sword, even though I had been a sword, there was something about the point of the blade that filled my mouth with copper. I wasn’t afraid of it, exactly. (How could you possibly be afraid of something you had been, however terrible?) The easiest way to explain it is by saying: she still lingers inside of me, somewhere, nameless and raveling, and she remembers it. But I am not her, or her; I am Nicnevin, and there is a unicorn with her horn too-close to the soft canvas of my skin. Those red, red eyes flicker closed. That is nearly worse, because, without the sight of them, I cannot understand what she is thinking at all.
She pulls away like a cobweb ripped from branches; slow and lingering, white spindles in her wake.
Hello, she says, in kind, her voice and her greeting so nearly-normal that I can almost forget the twining spire of her horn, I am Isolt. I repeat the name inside of my head. (I am sure that I have heard a story with an Isolt before, but that was lifetimes ago. I am sure that she was a different kind of Isolt, too.) Who are you?
The question makes me feel – strange. If you were to ask me why, I couldn’t tell you; I’ve never felt wrong about it before. I think that it must be something in the cadence of my voice. “I am…” and my voice seems to taper off, as though for a moment I have forgotten my own name, “Nicnevin.”
I know better than to think that I am still myself – or the self that I used to be. I don’t know why the sound of my name nearly feels wrong on my tongue. Perhaps, I think, it is because of the unicorn. Perhaps it is because of the way that she came too close, closer than any stranger should, with her jewel-red eyes and horn. Perhaps it is because of the way that she looked at me.
Surely, it should have been frightening. Surely, she shouldn't be frightening at all. She is smaller than me. More delicate. Not delicate at all. And - something about the way she carries herself seems to beg parts of me that have long been buried, shroud or sword, to the surface. I think that is it.
I don’t know why she came to me; surely it isn’t normal to come up to a stranger like that and linger so, so close. (It might be some symptom of youth – this body of mine is always pressing me to actions that never seem fully compatible with my state of mind. How many times have I started at some small, unthreatening creature or stumbled over the shape of my own hooves? Surely all girls are the same, as they grow into themselves.) “Did you…” I trail off again, and bite my tongue back so that I don’t lick my lips, “…want something, Isolt?”
Perhaps there is something that I am missing.
@Isolt || <3 <3 <3 | preface of Stigmata, Cixous
"Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
