Later I will tell myself I was about to leave, to find my sister, or my mother, or my own weeping wall to carve my sorrows from. Later I will tell myself it was only the roar of the river-veins beneath our hooves that I could hear, or the empty waiting of the market square that made my heart begin to snarl instead of beat.
Later, later, later —
I will know it was a lie.
Later, later, later —
I will know it was a lie.
I
n the silence of the empty market, Isolt can hear the lifeblood of the city humming beneath her hooves. In the layers and layers of cold laid against her spine there is the song of it, of those silver-blood rivers her sister had been following. Even the air tastes like it, like dead-stars and broken-promises and dreams that never learned how to fly high enough to come true.And she is there in the wild of it, the new-god of this castle of death pressing onward to the girl crumpled against the ground like she is the offering for death to consume.
Here, on this island of magic and hunger and things-that-should-not-make-sense, it is easy to be the wolf. It is easy to be the dragon, and the shadow, and all the other demons of the stories.
The inhale of her breath has nothing to do with pity, only hunger, only wanting, only the ease of coming across a prey that is already too weak to run away from its own death. Somewhere a pack is beginning to howl, and her sister’s heart is stumbling, and her mother is tapping out warnings against her hips. But Isolt hears only the whisper of the girl’s breath, and the rage of the rivers that cross together beneath the bones of the market.
She had heard a story once about two rivers that formed a cross underground. How the water turned to poison where the two currents overlapped, and everything that fed on their waters died. How the animals grew thin and hungry, and their minds were formed twisted, and how nothing in the world could sate their hunger, and each night the horses had laid out an offering to keep the monsters at bay —
she had been looking for those two rivers. And now a smile is curving sharp as a scythe upon her lips.
“No.” Her tail blade screeches as she walks forward, dragging the tip of it against the silver-bright ground. Ashes coat the edge of it in black dust that shines like a rotten smile.
“The rest of the castle is empty. It is only you and I here.”
No one here to know to look for her if she went missing. No one to stop the hunger gnawing along Isolt's ribs.
from my rotting corpse flowers shall grow
