isolt. I cannot stop watching her pulse drum against the corner of her jaw.
There is a hollow there that I know well, too well. A soft spot just behind the mandible, an artery tucked in neatly against her throat. I can hear her blood singing from it. And in it I can hear all the things I want from her.
There is a hollow there that I know well, too well. A soft spot just behind the mandible, an artery tucked in neatly against her throat. I can hear her blood singing from it. And in it I can hear all the things I want from her.
Her blood is whispering to her of a thousand ways to make a garden out of her bones, and a thousand means by which to unmake her. It’s all there in every drop of her magic, every terrible hum of violence that crawls up her spine and lingers there at the base of it. It’s all sharp edges and bone-bright flashes. There are wolves howling in her bones and something feral blinking back with her eyes. Each monster, every wicked thing that sleeps in the darkness of her forest and hunts in the moonlight while her father sleeps in a castle, they all are coming awake inside of her. And that rage that was there at her birth — the first thing she remembers when she opened her eyes and looked upon a world that she would never belong in — oh how it grows, and grows, and grows. And it burns.
Isolt is swallowing down the floodwaters of it and still it continues to rise.
And the higher it creeps up the back of her throat, the more she begins to wonder why she doesn’t let it consume her. Because her magic is still singing back to the pegasus’ blood, still crying come home, come home, come home with all the warning sounds of a starving wolf leading the sled dogs to the slaughter. And even with Vespera watching her in the distance, the only beauty she sees is in the way Nicnevin lingers long enough that their shadows begin to blend into one (nothing that wants to live stands so close to a unicorn’s horn without flinching.)
This was the thing her magic, her body, the furious beating of her heart was made for. And for the first time she wonders how her twin can smile without snapping her teeth, or laugh without watching for the way others bare their throats as they join her. And as the tempo of her hunger reaches a fever-pitch that sounds to her like a monster begging to be released, she is listening. And she is leaning into it bit by fragile bit.
“There is something I want.” There is no gentleness to be found in her voice. And if her eyes are whispering I understand beneath her blood-red horn then it is the blade itself whispering I am death. And death always wants.
It is wanting as her blood begs for more. Her wrath begs for the soft curl of her throat to press against so that she might begin to unmake her, and paint a new story with the pieces left behind when the brightness leaves her eyes.
But she blinks, and takes another step back. She can barely hear the way the snow crunches beneath her hooves over all her fury singing tomes of hunger and destruction to her. And she tries not to notice the way the screaming of her heart turns to sobs when she spins on one heel and runs, runs from the pegasus with her bloody eyes and the hunger that only she can see wrapped like a noose around the fragile curl of her neck.
She runs.
And she does not stop until she can no longer see Vespera watching her from the distance.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
