isolt.I have never stopped to wonder why I am like this. I have never stopped to question the magic that made me, or the love, or the hunger, or the almost-violence.
I do not know how to stop.
I only know that his blood is a song I have always been chasing. And I will find the end of it, even if it means spilling every last drop along the way.
I do not know how to stop.
I only know that his blood is a song I have always been chasing. And I will find the end of it, even if it means spilling every last drop along the way.
There is a snarl rising in her throat. She is choking on it, drowning in it — it fills her lungs like water and she, oh, she — She is smiling as she takes death between her teeth and pulls.
And she is smiling as she steps closer, and closer, and tastes the recklessness hanging like a veil around him. She fills her belly with his arrogance, grows drunk on his confidence — and when he grins back at her she is counting his teeth like pearls. And Isolt wonders how much prettier they might look strung upon one of his tendons, so that they might hang around her neck instead.
Isolt does not tell him that he is wrong (but oh! how she wants to!). But it is there in her eyes, in the blood-red determination of them that sparks like embers in a fire. And it is there in the very fabric of her being, in the magic that is printed across her veins, her bones, her muscles that whispers to her yes, yes, yes when she leans forward and wonders, is this it?
Is this what I was made for?
Her mother had told her the story of her creation once, only once. And Isolt had listened to it in quiet rapture, drinking in every inch of her mother’s bloody beginning until she had dreamed rivers of it. And when she had slipped away into the gardens that night she had pretended that she was the unicorn named Death, because Thana had promised to her that all the world would bow to her one day.
That one day could not come soon enough. Not for a unicorn born of seed and hunger, of rage and love. Not for the girl who was born remembering winters from years past, who was knitted together with the magic of the Rift and of gods.
“You are not death,” the blade of her tail carves out her rage in lines across the earth. “You do not know what death is, but I—“ I will show you, the violent color of her eyes promises.
The plants he killed turns to dust at her hooves in an instant, until mold and lichen are blossoming over the bones of it. And even as the swamp-child gasps and wilts the circle of death around her hooves only grows, and grows, and grows. It grows until her rage and her sorrow and her hunger turns every plant and grass and flower as black as her heart, until the ground beneath his own hooves releases its life with a gasp. The bones in the earth tremble, a egret raising its sun-bleached beak high into the air, an alligator tightening its jaw with vines instead of muscles.
And Isolt does not waiver. She steps forward and each step is the death of another root, and stem, and petal, and leaf. She steps forward and lays her horn like a promise against his brow, bone touching the soft gold of his antlers.
“Because all things must die,” she whispers against his skin, “and the dead will become my army.”
And she presses harder.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
