half of me for growth, the other for decay
I know her. This girl from the forest, this child who is so eager to death. I can feel it wrapped around her like a cloak, like disease, like rot creeping up the petals of my flowers. I wonder when it will reach her heart.
I wonder — and I know it is not today.
I wonder — and I know it is not today.
T
he flower is blooming bloody and bright and beautiful. And even when its stem grows twisted, and its petals curl over backwards, and its leaves wilt beneath the specks of disease and rot weighing them down — still, still, Isolt does not look away.She traces every unholy edge, commits all of it to memory so that she might repaint it in words for her sister. For the moment — only this moment — her circle of death has stopped growing, and reaching, because here in this single flower she can feel the wolves in her belly beginning to curl together in slumber.
And she starts to feel the ache of it, of beautiful things destined to wilt, and rot, and die. If she has ever wondered how a flower could make her sister both laugh and cry she will never need to wonder again. So as the flower grows with bent spines and hanging heads, she presses understanding into their petals.
It is there that Elliana finds her, bowed over her flowers like they are the god and she is the sinner falling to her knees before them.
She remembers her, the girl from the forest. And perhaps it is lucky then that her hunger is half-sated when she comes to her today, that she is not so desperate to fill the earth with more bones and blood. Perhaps it is a good thing that there is only one twisted flower of death in her circle and not a field of them to drown her in.
Isolt watches her come forward (like a dancer, like a child who does not know any better). She wonders where her ghosts are now, and why they’ve left her; but the thought is fleeting, and in a moment it is replaced only with the red of the petals spreading like blood from a wound through her mind.
“There has never been a difference between the two.” Not to me, her eyes are promising. Flowers were always grown in graveyards, to hide the smell and look of death. And flowers were always draped across every casket, in every funeral parlor, bouquets clutched close to the hearts of the diseased — flowers were as much for the dead as for the living.
Never before has Isolt felt so much like death as she does now, watching as the girl from the forest draw closer and closer like a botfly to the corpse flower.
And again she wonders how the girl who dances with ghosts does not see it, living there in every violent curl of her horn as proof. “Do you like my flower?” her voice is little more than a whisper, as she presses her lips to the petals and dusts them with pollen. And when she lifts her head and smiles, she can taste the poison spreading like honey across her teeth.
Poison has always been like honey to her.
Her tail moves as quickly and silently as a scythe, a soft whistle through the air as it cleaves stem from body. Isolt holds the flower out like an offering to the child. And when she asks her, “would you like to taste it, Elli?” it sounds like she is really asking —
are you ready for your grave yet, Elliana?
Again, she wonders.
