But then I wake up. And I hear the dead calling. And I feel my sister's heart beating against my own. And I think —
I think that other world is not so far away when I press my horn to her’s.
N
o one has ever asked them to stay before. Isolt does not have to pretend that she is some beloved thing. She is a monster, alone in the world save for her sister, and monsters like them were not welcomed sights in the court. She knew it every time their eyes followed her as she walked by like sheep watching a wolf stalk amongst them, every time mothers pulled their children closer until after her shadow had passed. And her heart, her magic, her rot, every terrible, lovely part of her reveled in it the way murder-birds reveled in the carnage of a battlefield.
But this girl — this child with her eyes the color of spring skies and with her brow marked with symbols of love instead of death — she had asked them to stay.
Isolt's lips peel back into a smile.
She smiles the way coyotes smile as they lord over their kills.
And as her sister presses into her side and she feels the tremor of her heart just below her skin, she feels her own heart begin beating to the death-song of her sister's organs. She wants to know what the drop of blood hanging from Danae's horn tastes like. She wants to pull every last drop of blood from this girl's body and water all the roots and bones of the forest with it, so that her sister might grow them a graveyard garden from the ruins.
You are wrong Danaë tells her, and Isolt hums her agreement. "If you were dead, your blood would be black and thick and rotten." She whispers the words through her smile, and presses the curl of her horn into her sister's neck. “You would know."
For a long while she stares at the child, watches her lips turn blue like her eyes. And when her sister smiles around a snarl she only sighs like the leaves trembling lonesomely on their branches above them.
"The dead are already here."
She blinks long and slow, while their heartbeats fill the spaces between them and the roots lying half-frozen in the ground begin to tremble at the sound of it. Even the forest recognizes its unicorn twins as monsters. "Can’t you feel them, waiting in the dark? They're crawling around beneath your hooves, crying for their eyes that do not see. Now, reaching out. Do you not feel it?”
Her smile is sharp, sharper than any unicorn has a right to be. But Isolt is no unicorn.
She steps closer, and no longer is she thinking of all the colors she does not know now to make. She thinks only of red, red blood, red tears, red eyes staring at them from between the trees. There is both a promise and a warning in the way she twists her horn to point in the darkness of the forest behind Elliana.
“Soon you will.”
@isolt speaks
isolt
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