ISOLT
Or do they only continue to hope, foolishly, that tonight is not the night? But it is, it is, and soon they will hope no more.
The first time she had followed her mother-unicorn out of the castle, it had been a secret. When she was supposed to be sleeping with her horn locked tightly with Danaë’s, she had instead been creeping between the trees as silently as a half-born thing could manage, holding her breath for fear of being discovered. She had learned what it meant to be a unicorn by watching her mother, who never tried to hide her hunger, or her violence, or all the ways in which she was more monster than mortal. And like a good daughter, she had learned well.
She thinks now that Thana had known all along that she was there in the woods, following behind her.
And there is a moment in which she stops and remembers that for all the darkness pressing in around her, she does not know how to be alone. And somewhere outside this forest there is another unicorn sleeping in the moonlight, as soft as she is violent. Isolt hopes she is dreaming of the hunt, of this hunt, so that she does not have to run after dying things alone.
Isolt draws close to her mother's side, pressing her muzzle against the dark red of her flank. Her hunger only keens all the louder inside of her chest when she tells it to wait. A tremor races down her legs, begs them to run, and run, and ruin.
But she only presses her cheek tighter against her mother, and taps out a song of impatience on the spring loam, anything to dull the ache settling in her jaw.
“A wolf would follow the dying thing,” she says quietly, because it is the wolf’s nature to chase down the easier prey. But she knows Thana will hear what she does not say, not in words but in hunger, that we are not wolves. The forest feels as though it is waiting, as it all the forest-creatures prey and predator alike is waiting for the monster in the shadows to learn how deep her hunger runs. Isolt pauses only long enough to wonder which way her twin would turn — but Danaë is not here. Not tonight. And there is nothing stopping her from being every bit as monstrous as she wants to be.
And the truth of it is there in her eyes, when she swings her horn between the two paths and chooses the blood trail that goes on, and on, and on, because she knows she is the only thing that can make it stop. She and her mother-unicorn, only this time she is leading the way as she begins to run again, unable to tell her hunger to wait my longer.
Both trails lead to dying things. Only one of them does not know it yet.
But Isolt does.
