ISOLT
It does not make it any better, or any easier, the ache that settles in my horn.
It makes the monsters smile wider.
There is something about the sight of the ivy pressed in around the table that enrages her.
Isolt does not know yet of spring, or that there are plants that refused to die back when winter knocks on their door. She only knew of winter, and how it wrapped itself like a noose around the world and tightened bit by fragile bit, like a cat playing with the mouse it was about to devour.
One day, she knew, the bucket would be kicked out from under their hooves and all the world would live in a darkness more eternal than that which lived in her eyes. But that winter was not yet here. And in the interim, Isolt was the winter that did not know how to relent.
She watches now as the leaves wilt one by one, specks of rot creeping across their verdant faces. There is beauty in the way their edges curl, the way the color shifts slowly in ever-darkening shades of green. Like poetry, she thinks — but that is wrong. Isolt does not know the sound of poetry. She knows only what exists in the gardens each night, when she presses her horn to her sister’s and a wilted garden rises between them like an altar, and the bones of the earth bow at their feet.
And she wonders only what it would look like if they raised their graveyard here, tonight, with the cloaked mare their first offering.
Her horn swings like a spear from one end of the table to the other. On one side, truth — and on the other, dare. She almost pulls away, and tells the girl that neither is more important than the song racing like wildfire across her spine. But she does not turn.
The wondering grows louder, its fangs larger, the holes it scrapes in her belly more painful to bear. And her tail blade begins that heart-beat tap, tap, tapping anew when she points the curl of her horn at the delicate, golden spike decorating the bridge of her nose, and whispers:
“You choose.”
@Hagar !
"wilting // blooming"
"wilting // blooming"
