The island feels as much like home now as it did when it was a maze of star-skeletons leading me deeper and deeper into its embrace.
I do not stop and wonder what the ribcage-bridge belonged to, or whether or not it wants its bones back. I do not stop to ask the castle if it is living or dead.
I know, I know, I already know, and I am home.
I do not stop and wonder what the ribcage-bridge belonged to, or whether or not it wants its bones back. I do not stop to ask the castle if it is living or dead.
I know, I know, I already know, and I am home.
A
ll the bone walkways and ribcage arches, all the hollow rooms and bright-white statues — all of it is filling a part of her that has only ever been empty and wanting.
Each room is filled with new wonders (that others might call horrors, but Isolt knows better), and each walkway that weeps silver star-blood at her feet is like a fountain for her to play in. Isolt is laughing as she races through the island, as she climbs higher and higher into its chest cavity. Her laughter echoes in all the hollow spaces of it like breathing, like she is the only thing alive and moving in all that stagnant air.
She does not stop to listen to the crying walls, or the screaming ones, or the ones that scrawl words with arcane meanings across themselves as she passes.
Isolt does not hear anything above the thump, thump, thumping of her own heart, and the song her tail blade sings every time it taps its own melody against the bone-white floors. And that is what drives her on, the sound of her heart calling out to the bones of the castle, and knowing the bones of the castle were welcoming her home. And her smile grows fat and wide upon her bloody lips.
She does not knowing how long she is dancing before she hears a cry that is not coming from the walls. But she follows the sound of it, the sound of something — someone — other who does not belong in her castle of death.
And when she comes upon the girl lying crumpled in the ashes, she only tilts her head and taps out a greeting to her with her horn against an empty merchant stall.
“Why are you crying?” she asks her in her paper-thin voice. But in her bloody gaze there is a promise — the promise that there is only one reason to cry, and it has only just arrived.
from my rotting corpse flowers shall grow
