My horn shatters against the jawbone of the stag.
S
he is breaking when she drives the point of her horn against a thing that knows better than she what it means to live. Even when the hollows of her horn are finally filled and it eases that terrible pit of hunger in her belly, she cannot help but think it makes her more of a monster than she already was. And for as young as she still is, Isolt is so very tired of feeling like a monster. But for every piece of her that breaks there is her magic, knitting her back together. And for every part of her heart that thinks itself grotesque, or wrong, or a thing-that-should-not-exist, there is her twin’s heart beating to the same tune to let her know she is not alone.
How can a thing be wrong, when she has her sister there to assure her it is their right?
She can feel his blood rushing warm and thick down the curls of her horn like a baptism of death. And she can feel the deer’s life fading as he bleeds out, the same way she can feel her own blossoming like a bloody flower as it does.
As he dies, they are living. Like parasites feeding from a host, every drop of his life-blood bids her to grow faster, and taller, and stronger.
So she does.
She grows. And she grows. And still she grows. And as her horn spirals further and further from her brow and her tail blade whittles itself against a rock into that terrible sickle-moon, she thinks only to the furious magic that made her, yes. Yes, yes, yes.
Like gardens grown in a bitter earth, they grow.
And when she curls her neck over the throat of the deer like a wildcat lording over its trophy, she smiles back at her twin. “I told you,” she whispers to her through a mouth full of blood and bone and broken teeth, “we are faster than mortal things.”
She does not hear the forest weeping around them. But if she did, she would not understand the meaning of it.
@danaë speaks
isolt
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