isolt. What is a monster who does not wish to be a monster?
I ask myself this sometimes, when I look at my sister and a flower both wilts and blooms against her lip, when she tries to be more life than death. I know it hurts, this magic of our’s that is killing her as surely as it is giving me life. I know it the same way I know this winter we were born into can not last forever, even when I have known nothing else.
Maybe I have become the more terrible monster, to save her from it instead.
I ask myself this sometimes, when I look at my sister and a flower both wilts and blooms against her lip, when she tries to be more life than death. I know it hurts, this magic of our’s that is killing her as surely as it is giving me life. I know it the same way I know this winter we were born into can not last forever, even when I have known nothing else.
Maybe I have become the more terrible monster, to save her from it instead.
She pauses.Isolt counts the seconds like she counts heartbeats, and bones, and pulses fluttering in the curves of mortals’ throats. All the world seems shrunken down to this, to this fragile space separating them, to the thread hanging invisibly between them that feels all the while as though it is pulling her in, pulling her closer, as if she could reach out and drag the words from her throat.
She pauses, and Isolt feels as though she is hanging onto the end of the silence, waiting on every word.
And she is not sure why.
Nicnevin.
She sighs, her lungs fluttering like a pair of autumn leaves caught in the wind. It is the sound of a thing dying, she thinks, of winter and hunger settling into all the places where other unicorns have only light, and laughter, and a magic that spreads like moonlight instead of darkness. And yet there is a moment when she opens her eyes and looks at the leaf spread across her brow, that she wishes —
She almost wishes that she were spring instead of winter. That the smell of the other girl’s skin, the sweet way magic and memories cling to her and make Isolt’s heart settle into a war-drum beat. But she recognizes the silence, the way her voice tapers as if she is trying to decide if iwho she is matches what she is. Her horn aches for music, the kind it would make when it rends the air in two and waters the snow with blood, and still, still, she raises it instead of lowers it. Magic is running wild in her veins and there is nothing for it to reach for, nothing but the skin of a girl marked by another world’s forest, and for once, Isolt wishes for a flower to make rot instead.
Somewhere below the snow, roots are turning black and brittle. Someday when the spring comes, there will be a patch of grass that does not grow, where the wildflowers dare not send their roots.
And it is not enough. It is not nearly enough for the magic that trembles like something coming alive inside of a body that has only ever been dying before. It will never be enough to satisfy the wolves that claw at the back of her throat like beasts of winter half-starved, half-dead.
When she swallows again, Isolt tastes the bright tang of copper coating the back of her tongue.
She holds Nicnevin’s question there between her teeth, chewing over the words like someone who has forgotten how to speak her own. “Is there —“ Oh, if only she knew all the things Isolt wanted that dance like an executioner with a sword in her dreams.
“Is there something I should want from you?”
Other than each beat of her heart, and every drop of her blood, and all the notes of her almost-musical soul that fill the space between them. She hears it, and her magic hears it, too, and the blade of her tail starts to tap against the snow along to its rhythm.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
