isolt.
Sometimes, I think maybe it is not too late to choose.
Isolt has never seen a forest drenched in sunlight. She is too new, too young, too made in winter — and already it feels like a lifetime of it.Bones snapping as they grow too quickly for a newborn body. Heart racing as more and more blood pools into it. The memory of something else, something other, a world that existed before she did but will not exist after her (she would make sure of that.) Her made-in-magic thoughts remember, even when she does not, what it means to be a unicorn dressed in blood and bone instead of innocence.
And her bones remembers spring, and remembers that her father loves the spring, because in spring things are growing a little faster than they are dying.
His feathers touch her cheek, and she is frozen. Everything in her, every terrible, lovely piece of her is trembling at the touch, and begging her to take that feather between her teeth and pull, and pull, and pull. Until this winter-prince unravels, so that she can unmake him piece by golden piece.
But she doesn't.
And the aching sets to howling when he asks her — gentle and and innocent as a lamb, and she the monster he does not yet know he should be afraid of.
"I want to not be myself." To not have all of this hunger tearing her apart, claws at her throat and fangs in her belly, a pack of wolves running in her veins. She wants to recognize his gold as sunlight, as warmth, as life. She wants —
oh, she wants a hundred things. And most of those wants start with blood.
Isolt is a unicorn made of magic, and hunger, and the horn weighing heavy on her brow is curled and hollow for a reason. The truth of it is lying there before him like a noose, grim And unmistakable. And Isolt does not know if she should be thankful that he does not see it, or if she should carve it in words across his skin.
She only knows that he is too gentle a thing to belong in her forest of monsters. "Heroes are only those who have decided to be the saviors instead of the ones who need saving. You should decide now which you would rather be, or the world will decide for you." She does not tell him the third option — that for every savior there is also a villain, as terrible as they are good. Better to let him stay innocent, to not recognize his death when it draws near. Beater to not feel fear, but to die quietly. Peacefully.
She regards him quieter for but a moment, before she turns away with a sigh that is as then as the paper - bark that trembles as she walks by. “Come,” she tells him as she breaks the darkness apart with her horn, "and I will show you the way out of the forest."
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
