The truth of it is written in every sharp point of my body, in the way my horn has always felt more a weapon than a weight, more gruesome than I am beautiful. And most days the difference between being soft and being sharp is drowned by the roar of blood and magic filling every hollow part of me.
But somedays, I wonder what I would look like — if I were not myself.
I
f there is ever a moment in which she thinks about sobbing instead of snarling, she does not show it. And if ever she wants to save the stag instead of kill it, then the thought lives only in the spaces between her heart beats and is swallowed up by her lungs the moment they begin to expand again.Isolt does not try to pretend to be anything other than the monster in the woods with a smile too sharp and full of teeth.
But her sister — her sweet sister, her unicorn-soul, her other-half — is breaking as much as she is being formed. And as they fly side-by-side through the forest close enough that their shoulders brush with every stride, Isolt feels her heart stumble and catch the pace of Danaë’s.
Ahead of her, two versions of the same blood-red unicorn run:
One of them runs with madness rampant in every step, tongue lolling, eyes blazing like twin rubies. Every stride forms her into more of a hunter, every step brings her that much closer to her prey. And every time the stag stumbles she leaps, jaws opening wide to catch his breath before he does.
That version of her does not stop when her sister-unicorn does.
But there is another Isolt that is still almost-soft, one that has not yet grown into the monster she knows she has only to choose to become. That Isolt is still growing, her tendons still stretching, her heart still racing to catch up with the blood that seems only ever to multiply and burn in her arteries. And she watches as that version of herself pauses beside her sister atop that rotten, fallen oak, and presses their quivering shoulders together.
Isolt watches, and she is not sure which bloody unicorn she wants to be. The hunter or the protector, the killer or the savior. The sharp edge of the blade telling her we can, we can, and we will — or the soft curl of their ribs fitting together as one.
She wants to say that the sound of her sister's heart calling out to her own is stronger than the thrill of the hunt.
So why then does she fly past the other unicorn, tucking her knees over the corpse of the once-proud oak tree? And why is it that she leaps forward to lay her horn against the stag's throat instead of pressing her cheek to Danaë’s?
Everything that she is, every terrible lovely, broken piece of her wants to cry then. Even as the stag's knees finally give out, and he sinks down beneath her as if in reverence, it feels as wrong as it does right.
@danaë speaks
isolt
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