[P] I saw you in the grave

[Isolt]

ISOLT

It never lasts long enough. I wish we could lie here forever and watch our children dance around us, listen to the music of the wind whistling through their eye sockets and the leaves whispering against their ribs. I wish they would go on forever, dance forever, sing forever, bloom forever -- but they always crumble back into all their separate pieces when the magic runs its course through my sister and leaves her emptied in a flash.

I wish I did not have to choose, between my sister or our bright, dead things. I want them both. I want them always.

---

There is a song of death dancing around inside of her chest in place of a heartbeat. A thing made to devour this world and the next one curls around her heart like a noose, in between the vines and the arteries and her rib bones all tied together in a knot. There is no wisteria blooming in her lungs, or leaves unfurling to fill the holes of her heart.

There is only rot creeping up her throat, coating the back of her tongue in black specks and grey fuzz.

And even as Isolt wipes the blood-tears from her sister’s eyes and kisses her brow, all she sees beneath her lips is another dead thing coming awake with roots and petals knitting her fragile form together. Danaë is blooming in all the ways Isolt is crumbling to ash and dust. And if it only lasts a moment, still it is long enough for her to know which of their creations in the garden is the most beautiful.

Perhaps that is why it feels so much like the roots of her own heart being ripped out of the soil of her body, when the magic finally breaks and Danaë falls with the rest of the risen things. They fall, and they fall apart, all the pieces holding them together collapsing.

The fox stumbles, its jaw falling empty-mouthed to the ground without the ivy wiring it closed. The hare tears itself in half when it tries to take its next step, petals and roots falling out of its cleaved-open stomach in place of intestines and stomach. The fawn’s legs let go of its body and it tumbles into a pile of bones and leaves. All her bright, dead things come grinding to a half, and Isolt almost forgets to catch her sister when they do.

But it is that name, whispered on her twin’s lips, that reminds her she is only half of a unicorn and not a god (as much as she sometimes wishes it were not so.) She lays her sister down in their father’s garden, in a pile of bones and wilted flowers and fallen leaves, tucking her in with all the gentleness of a unicorn and none of the wrath of a monster.

When she lays down beside her and tangles their legs together once more, she does not bother to clean up the blood. She only thinks it makes her twin look even better now, more like herself.

And that is how the morning sun finds them, with Isolt keeping watch over all her terrible, lovely monsters.

@danaë ❁
"wilting // blooming"

❁