There is never I moment where I stop. Because death does not know how to wait.
It only takes hearing it once for Isolt to decide she hates the sound of laughter.
It makes her jaw begin its aching anew, as her teeth grind together like things reshaping themselves against a stone. She wonders how long it would take before they are as sharp as the other unicorn’s. She wonders if her smile could ever be as terrible (and as lovely) as a girl with a mouth like a shark’s.
And she wonders, oh she wonders if the blood would taste any sweeter than it already does in the mouth of a monster. Always she wonders.
The snap of the wolf’s teeth at her tail does not to stop her from reaching, and reaching, and reaching across the fragile space between them like a blade cutting through a screen. It does not stop when the girl’s laughter spills like blood from a slashed throat. It does not stop at the warning rolling like thunder across her storm-cloud skin, loud enough she can feel the echo of it in her bones. It only taps out its own warning on the ice that is beginning to look wrong, and empty, and dull without blood to gorge itself on.
It is still tapping when she steps forward and traces the light catching on every sharp line of the girl’s smile. And Isolt does not need to wonder anymore if they are aching like her own, or if her horn is any less a sword or a spear or a weapon made for carving out hearts and eating them.
She knows then that the stillness of the empty meadow is only a world feigning dead as it watches two unicorns with war drums for hearts. And if she was any less of a thing made in magic she might have turned then and gone back to her forest, and carved out the sap and frozen hearts of a dozen trees that would never again know the warmth of spring. If it were not for the brine in the girl’s veins calling out to the rot in her’s, she might have heard the forest weeping over the sound of her own hunger.
“There is only one way you could show me,” she promises, because there is only one way that matters and already she is imagining what her skull would look like at the bottom of the ocean, stripped of its flesh by predator fish, seaweed tangled around her horn.
And then, softer, “wouldn’t you like to go home?” as she reaches across the pretending-to-be-dead distance and traces the scales beneath her eyes with her blade.
@avesta
”wilting // blooming“
”wilting // blooming“
