isolt.
Would it weep or rejoice if I did? Would I?
Her father had told her of the way the forest wept, the first time it tasted blood on its roots.What Isolt did not tell her father is this: after that first day, the forest had not only learned the difference between water and blood, it had begun to hunger for it. And now it does not cry when it tastes blood —
it cries when it does not.
She can feel the way the trees have grown twisted beneath her hooves (not all of them, but enough to count). She can feel the way they hold their buried bones close, how their branches have become claws reaching out for the pegasus-that-does-not-belong, not at night, not when the wild things are awake, awake, awake.
He should not be here, in her winter forest at night. That is what she tells herself as she leads him through the trees, following the silver sliver of the sickle moon through the branches.
There is only silence following his question, and the sound of the frost cracking beneath their hooves, and the roar of her heartbeat in her ears (so loud she wonders that he cannot hear the way her blood is humming.) And when she sighs her breath curls like smoke above them, and the tap, tap, tap of her tail against her hip speeds up.
She does not tell him that she is the thing he should be hiding from but it’s there, it’s there in the way the moonlight turns bloody as it falls upon her horn. “I am Isolt.” And again the frozen ground shivers. And again she tells the bones and the disease-twisted roots to stay down, down, down, as she swallows the monsters and the magic alike.
Somewhere wolves are howling, far in the distance, and Isolt only quickens her step, and she does not look behind to see if he is still following. She breaks into a trot skims across the ground with an almost-grace, and she does not stop until she sees the break in the trees ahead of them. She leads him out into the moonlight, where the snow is shining and the crack of ice underhoof sounds more like laughter than things dying.
“You would like the forest better in the day. It is a happier thing then.” She tries to smile for it. But the smile is a broken thing on her lips, one full of teeth instead of joy.
And already she is edging back to the darkness of her waiting forest. “You will have to find your way from here,” she whispers as the distance between them grows wider and wider like a wound, “next time, look for me in the wild parts of the city.”
She does not say if he comes back. Already she knows he will be back again in the same way she knows the spring is coming, even when she has not seen it for herself. Her smile flickers and fades like the death of a star, and before waiting for his reply she turns and disappears back into the forest. And this time, Isolt does not stop running, or hunting, or searching, or aching, until long after the sun has risen and exhaustion makes her legs give out.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
