ISOLT
The dead are sleeping, but their dreams are mine.
T he darkness feels colder than it should. It curls like a finger down her spine, breathing down the back of her neck, hanging like a funeral shroud down her sides. It feels hungry, in the way that winter is always hungry, in the way a graveyard that has been abandoned is always hungry.
All this space —
All this room for new gravestones —
Isolt wonders how long it would take to fill it all. How many dead she would have to wake, just to lead them here to their stagnant graves. Already she is imagining how they would look — she blinks and she can see them there, lined up neatly on either side of the narrow path she walks now, bodies curled into a bow as she passes. The thought carves a smile through her cheeks, and it is a wonder that her teeth still flash brightly in the darkness.
Like bones left out beneath the moonlight.
She drags her tail blade along the cavern floor behind her, tracing arcane patterns even she does not recognize through the dust. The sound it makes, bone against stone, is like wailing; it swells up, up, up to fill the caverns, twists through the chambers of her heart like wind whistling through the caves. It is the only part of her that is singing, or dancing, whispering to the dead in nightmares and terrors, filling their sleep with all the violence of a hundred bloody deaths.
The stone is cool and damp against her skin, when she turns and traces her muzzle down the walls. When she licks her lips it tastes like copper and dust and mold. She imagines it to be blood soaking the walls, and she is thankful there is not enough light to ruin the illusion. But ahead of her a light is flickering into existence, flames lapping at the darkened walls.
Isolt presses on hungrily, everything in her straining for the darkness, begging to bring whatever life clings to the fire down to its knees, to submission. Her tail flicks faster along the cavern floor, wails turning to howls as her walk turns to a dance.
The corridor suddenly opens into a rounded room, a single torch burning defiantly in its bracket on the wall. Its light does not fall against faces, or skin, or eyes —
but the room is not empty, not truly. The walls live and breathe with a thousand scriptures and ancient arts scrawled across it, alive and dancing in the flickering firelight. And where the caves she had passed through were only dark and twilight-grey, the room she stands in now is bursting with colors.
There is a scene unfolding on the walls, a group of men armed with spears chasing after a dark shadow. She follows it around the room, as they sprint through forests and deserts and lakes in pursuit of the beast. A story is printed in an ancient, forgotten language above each scene.
But she does not care what the words mean, or the purpose of the picture story.
No, when Isolt steps forward and drags her nose down a line of red painted over one of the warrior’s throats, she only wonders what happened to the mens’ bones, after the beast was finished picking its teeth with them.
@aster !
"wilting // blooming"
"wilting // blooming"
