For a dead thing I feel so very, very alive. The snow beneath my hooves glimmers like my mother’s quartz and the dappled light feels like a story told by my father when I could not sleep in the belly of a ship (so far from the ocean and yet so close to it). There is both blood and sea-foam rushing in my veins that warms me as much as it cools the hurricane wrath I do not know how to stop feeling. Every inch of me, every feeling, every urge, makes my head swim with thoughts that always err on the side of terrible.
As I always am, I am glad that I am not a wall in which my sister might pull secrets. I would suffocate her with a weight heavier than stone.
“Don’t you?” Before I say the words I already know the answer. It’s there in her gaze-- that look of the crows and the vultures with eyes and pearls between their beaks in the aftermath of war. I wonder at the way she does not try to hide it. Her strangeness, her hunger, her unicorn morality (by which I mean none), is all there for me to read like a story.
But I tire of reading. I want to flip to the end of the tale.
My horn does not angle away as her own does. The curl of my smile turns as kind as a look full of sharp teeth can be. Parts of my jaw ache with the need to lay my body against the curl of her own. And when she angles her wicked tail my way I cannot help but laugh at the threat in the movement. I have stared down far sharper things.
Foras snaps at her tail in the lone warning that he gives to any creature (for she is a creature as a much as I). My laughter brightens into something terrible. “I cannot teach you what they look like.” I warn her as much as I warned any soldier on the warfield. From this angle I know our horns do not look very different from swords, and spears, and other things welded to maim and drink. And drink they always do…
“But I can show you.” And my own threat, my own rolling tide thunder, brings with a smile that is sharper than the last. For now I do not move closer, or lean my horn away from the crown of her own (I have no interest in the sky).
For now.
Like the quiet in the middle of two sides of war.
@Isolt
