I S O L T
Oh, if only she knew. I know more of death than girls who carry crow heads around like hand bags. I know of monsters that crawl around in the dark with lichen bruising their cheeks and maggots crawling through the holes in their hearts. And I know how easy it is to turn bright-eyed things like her into those blind beasts crying out for their eyes that do not see.
There are a thousand ways for me to unmake her.
When she blinks, she can see the girl’s empty eye sockets gaping at her from within a bleached skull. She watches the daisies as they begin to bloom, sun-bright petals hugging the curves of her jaw while seeds crack between her teeth. Her storm-grey skin is gone, no teal runes mark her brow. The crow hanging lopsided from her poll is dusty and ragged, his beak chipped.
Isolt likes this version of her better.
A unicorn, as made as she is, does not know how to love anything else but death and destruction. She does not know that it is wrong to want to carve the truth across the other girl's throat with her horn, or to count vertebrae instead of wishes beneath her skin. She does not know that her horn could be anything more than a weapon, a tool by which to bring religion to a non-believer. She carries it now like a sword, as the ground beneath them begins to groan and the hemlocks bow their branches as if in reverence to her. And never does she think that it is wrong — that it is not her right — to be worshipped by them, root and rot alike.
She does not know that she is other.
And there is never a moment in which she pauses to wonder at where her mother-monster might be, or why other children hide beneath their own mothers' legs (she does not even know what it means to be a child — she has only ever understood that she is a unicorn, and a harbinger, and a thing-that-should-not-exist, and that was enough for her.) She only smiles (and smiles and smiles and smiles, with a look that seems more wolfish than girl) and lowers her horn to cross like a blade against the beak of the girl’s mask.
She can see the way it reflects color across its smooth surface, like blood spilt across a polished floor. It makes a shiver of delight course down her spine.
“Yes.” The word aches when she whispers it against the girl’s cheek. And if she is surprised by the beauty of mortal skin beneath her immortal lips she does not show it. The spaces between her teeth are too empty to show anything but hunger and violence and the memory of the sweetness of rotten things. “But you are not dead anymore.” And what she does not say is how that makes her worthless to unicorns with poppy hearts and morning glory lungs.
Her horn cries out with wanting when she twists it along the crow’s beak and drags it like a bow across a violin. It’s a gesture that promises an answer to every confession the crow-girl has not spoken, that live only in her too-bright eyes. It promises immortality, and the sound of it is the only music Isolt will ever know. It sounds like please, and like violence, and like a unicorn answering yes, yes, yes to the gloaming darkness.
Around them pine needles begin to rain like tree-tears, as sap grows mold in their veins and pinecones turn soft and black. And that, too, is the music her spore-ridden heart hums along to.
“All the dead,” she repeats, with the cool hush of winter growing thicker in her voice, “are mine to love, and mine to command, and mine alone.”
If Isolt has ever wondered why she was colored like blood, the only answer she has ever needed is coming awake in her magic now. And it’s there in the way the fox lying between them suddenly twists its head around, and lays its teeth against the crow-girl’s single white leg.
@maybird !
"wilting // blooming"
