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here is a part of her that knows what they are doing is wrong. That part of her that was born of their father's magic, the one that trembles and grows smaller each time she smiles with blood falling from her teeth like tears.That is the unicorn who stopped when she did not, and whispered against her twin’s cheek we do not have to kill him. We do not have to be the monsters of this story.
And she is not that unicorn.
She is laughing as she feels her bones break and reform themselves, and she is whittling down the curls of her horns into a sharpened edge against the stag’s vertebrae. The feeling of his blood joining with her’s and making her veins swell is euphoric, and she is diving into that pool of magic without stopping to wonder how deep it might take her. And in the blood that coats her throat she is remembering what it is like to live season, after season, after season, even when all she has known herself is winter.
In his blood she is growing, and learning, and remembering a thousand things a unicorn should never have to know. And it is easy, too easy, to give into that part of herself that is always hungry, and always aching, and always wanting for more. She is becoming —
oh, she is blossoming like the corpse flower that only knows how to kill the very things sent to save it. And never does she stop to think there might be something wrong in that, or profane, or anything but her right as a thing born of hunger and seed and magic.
It is only her sister’s touch that can have her turning away from the body of the stag and drawing patterns of love instead of hate across her skin. It is only when her sister tangles their tails together like roots that she thinks to stop drawing lines between the stag’s ribs with her blade. And even when Danaë does not lower herself to feast on the throat of this corpse they’ve made she brushes his blood against her lips anyway, as gently as a moth landing upon a flame.
She sighs against her, when after what feels like an eternity she lifts her body from where it had fallen overtop their kill. Isolt can feel the blood cooling, as the wind makes patterns in the steam that rises from them and chills her shoulders. She presses herself to her sister (who is still so warm, and soft, and alive when the deer is growing colder, and stiffer with every passing second.) And she trembles, when she feels Danaë’s bones shaking and her lungs fluttering and her marrow singing a song only the two of them would know.
She trembles. And she feels, for a second, only mortal. While their immortality rises like a many-headed beast and sets to gnawing at each of her ribs like it is sowing hunger instead of seeds by which she might root, and grow, and blossom. Even while she grows she feels small, like the child she never learned how to be.
But then the magic — the real magic, their magic — starts. And when the first daffodil takes the place of the stag’s eyes and he sighs because he is finally seeing the world for what it is, she forgets all about that other unicorn that she is not.
There is only Isolt, and Danaë, and she will not worry about the things they could have been (or perhaps should have become).
“Will you grow me a magnolia flower?” she asks, when she presses her cheek to her sister’s neck and feels her eyes slipping shut. It is the last thing she wants to see, the one thing she wants to fall asleep thinking of. And she begs those roots reaching for the stag’s heart to grow, and grow, and grow, and never stop.
@danaë speaks
isolt
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