isolt.
Boys with magic in their lungs and dreams in their eyes. Dreams I was meant to end, and magic I was made for consuming. I did not understand then why they should be any different than the others I was made to destroy but now — now I know.
It is in the way he looks at me, and how my heart rages against it.
There is magic curling in the boy’s veins, magic enough to bring the sky crashing down to the earth.And he is red — of course he is red, the world is always red in the places where her shadow falls across it — glowing red, light spilling from the bloody marks around his eyes, his legs, his wings. It beats like a heart.
Isolt’s own heart trembles to catch the pace of it. And then, like a wolf chasing after the hare, it settles into his rhythm.
And when she presses closer to him (and closer, and closer, close enough to touch the tip of her muzzle against one brown, ruddy wing and close her eyes against its light), she sighs. If she is surprised at all to feel his mortal skin beneath her immortal lips, or to find it cooling the fever of her cheek when her eyelashes flutter like butterflies against it, she does not show it. If she is surprised to feel the energy so much like her own, so ready to explode, there is no hint of it when she reaches out and lays her cheek against his wing. She only blinks like a doe caught in the morning sun’s light, and traces the tip of one long feather with her teeth.
How easy it would be to rip it out. How easy it would be to tear a wing from a body. Just there, in that hollow space beneath the joint, a perfect resting place for her horn.
But her father had wings, she reminds herself. Wings more fragile than this mortal boy’s — but it feels like a crime then, as if to do this now would be as if doing it to Ipomoea himself. So she begs the monsters rising in her throat to stay down, down, down, and trembles when she feels them relent. Down her chest they crawl like botflies down the throat of a corpse flower. And Isolt only hopes that she is like the corpse flower in this: that her monsters will stay trapped long enough to see this boy walk away.
Even so, every pine needle that touches her back turns black, and fermented, and crumbles to pieces that flow down her sides like tarry tears.
She could almost laugh then, when he names her spirit and angel, savior and guardian. With her rotten tears and her horn swinging like a noose between the darkness and him, with the magic in his blood singing so sweetly her teeth ache to pull it from him. How perfect it seems, a prey so willing to be devoured.
“Do not call me that.” She pulls away from him with a sigh, a whisper, cringing from the light that seems to her like her own soul laid bare in the forest. “I am no one’s savior.” Only death, her tail draws in arcane lines through the rotten pine needles, and ruin, and despair, and the end.
And then a whisper, in a voice that is far too gentle to belong to a unicorn that is more made than born:
“You should be your own savior.”
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
