from my rotting corpse
There are no other unicorns to stare at me here. No mirrors to show me broken down into all of my pieces, no stars pretending to be anything but dreams that have died.
Only bones for me to carve. And hearts for me to dig free. And a thousand horrors that coo like doves when they see me coming for them.
Only bones for me to carve. And hearts for me to dig free. And a thousand horrors that coo like doves when they see me coming for them.
I
solt does not have any time for the shops with their weeping walls and their priceless treasures waiting like lambs for the slaughter.And she has no heart to listen to the screaming wall beneath the weeping one, or to see the pattern of the city spiraling up, and up, and up the same way her horn does when she lifts it to the sky. Isolt is not mortal enough to see anything but the way the inside of the city feels like standing within the ribcage of a giant beast she thinks she once knew the name of. And when she rakes her tail across the opaline floor the wailing sound it makes seems to her like all those star-skeletons coming back to life, like a memory half-forgotten coming back as a ghost.
And what is a ribcage she wonders, but a thing made to guard a heart?
So that is where she goes, with the tip of her bloody horn leading the way. Straight to the heart of the city.
And oh! Maybe this is the reason Isolt has no heart of her own to care for the living: because it is here instead, rooted in the belly of an island that feels as though it were made for her.
Her walk turns to a trot, then a run, then a gallop in which she stretches out long and low and loses herself in the furious beat of her hooves cracking the bone-dry ground with every step. And never does she stop to look down, or to wonder where the heart of the city (her heart) lies. When it calls to her, she can feel it echoing inside of her chest with every beat. Come, it says, come, come, come —
so she does. And with every step rot is blooming from her hoofprints like flowers, specks of black forming arcane patterns that only she would know the meaning of. The walls grow thick with it, and the bone-pillars crack and fill each crevice with curled ribbons of bone pretending to be leaves, and berries, and dreams.
She runs until the throne rises up bright and terrible before her. And seated on that throne —
is her heart.
And wrapped around her heart is a ribcage that is not her own, bones and driftwood twisted into the shape of a prison. There are flowers there, and teeth, and leaflets of poison ivy, and eyes staring back at her. Somewhere a mouth pulls back into a smile, and something trembles to behold it (and oh! how the ground shakes with its tremblings.)
Her heart beats out its sorrow on the throne. Her chest aches in answer.
And Isolt listens to the keening of her tailblade as she scrapes it along the throne room floor, bone against bone, a wail rising through the hollow throne room.
