ISOLT
Like birds that can sense when a storm is coming, so too do the trees know when a monster casts its shadow beside their’s. I can feel them whispering to each other, root to root and leaf to leaf.
I smile. And I think to myself, let them know that I am coming.
Every whispering branch and rustling leaf is holding its breath, while the forest sits in a darkness and blackness so thick she might reach out and cut through it with her horn. Somewhere there are bones, and blood, and animals hiding in their shallow graves (what is a den but a soon-to-be grave?) for the monsters to pass. And if it were any other night, Isolt would have gone looking for them.
If it were any other night she would be hunting, with only the sliver of a young moon to hang like a weight from her horn. She would be listening to the dead sob between the trees while she cuts away tree-limb after tree-limb with her blade and watches the wood cry in newly-budded leaves all around her. Over and over and over again until it becomes not spring in her forest, but the bare-branches and dead-hush of winter.
There are a thousand memories she could bleed from the forest without the moon to watch, of skeleton branches and golden saplings and monsters-that-were-made settling down to feast. And all it takes is one whisper of a new-spring coming awake for her to begin to wonder at all the ways in which she might bury it beneath rot and frost again. Wonder lives in her bloody gaze, a look that has never known how to be innocent, or soft, or holy.
But somewhere in the darkness lying ahead of her is her mother-unicorn, leaving a dead-path that calls her to come, come, come along.
Isolt is following a trail of rot so thin another unicorn (one without flowers wilting in her lungs and a horn that only sings when it is carving through bone) might never have noticed it. But Isolt has violence in her veins instead of moonlight, and a wolf pack yipping and slobbering in place of a heartbeat. So she turns into that trail, and leaves her risen things to crawl their own way free from their prisons. She follows it as it leaves the castle and weaves between the trees, holding her breath and her magic tightly as she stalks like a second shadow in Thana’s wake.
Like a lion cub learning to hunt by batting at its mother’s tail, so Isolt becomes a daughter-unicorn wrapped in almost-innocence. Shadows gather between the curls of her horn and in the gaunt hollows of her cheeks as she tucks her head and leads the way with that spiral of bone and blood. Mold glimmers dark and fermented against her lips.
All the while that death-knell trembles below her skin, begging to be set free. Still her blood and magic burn in her veins in a way that makes her want to scream, and sob, and sing into the darkness of decay pressing in around them.
And Isolt does not try to hide the ache of her teeth, of her hunger, as she trails after her mother-monster.
