I was made to end unicorns who think their wars were the only wars that mattered in this world.
It is why I was given an empty space between my lungs instead of a heart.
If there was ever a moment where Isolt has looked up at the stars and wondered why she was a creature made instead of a daughter born, the answer is there in the rage she can feel echoing in the other unicorn’s bones.
And if ever she wanted to ask if there was a way to make the hunger end or the pain stop, she is not thinking of it now when their horns become weapons instead of weights. She is not thinking of anything but the pulse in the other girl’s throat, the seawater-blood that lures her in in a way no siren song ever could.
Every bear, and coyote, and vulture is screaming at the violence in her eyes that promises a banquet about to be laid out. Below it all she can hear nothing else. She can feel nothing else. She can see
nothing
else.
Only the promises carved into her bones that tell her that one day, some day, she will unmake the world. And Isolt does not stop to ask it if today is that today (perhaps it is because she already knows the answer, and that answer makes her blood turn black and thick and terrible.)
But at the feel of teeth against her skull her rage turns to a snarl, to a whine, to finally a keening sound that she does not recognize as her own.
The only question that is left then is in the whimper hanging like seeds from her teeth. The wondering that sets in next, that insatiable desire that wants to scream and scream and rage at the magic that made her, oh how it burns.
All this hunger gnawing at her ribs, whittling them into spears.
All this pain of growing too quickly and still not quickly enough, of this pool of rage festering black and dark in the depths of her and not enough means to fill it.
Isolt was made with a war inside of her veins begging her to rend, and ruin, and consume. But she was born not knowing how to stop it, or control it, or how to form it into something she can wield. She is an explosion that burns out too fast.
And with the wolf’s claws at her belly, and his weight driving her down, still that dark pit begs for more. Still she wants to snarl around the pain, to tear herself open on another monster’s fangs if only to know once and for all that nothing — not even death — will make the pain of being a thing-made-with-too-much-hunger stop.
And she relents only as all wild things do: with the promise of next time. Tomorrow she will be stronger. Tomorrow she will learn from this. Tomorrow she will be more a weapon and less a girl.
Today she falls to her knees, and she is not sure if the roar in her chest is more hatred or reverence.
And never has she felt so young as she does from the ground.
@avesta
”wilting // blooming“
”wilting // blooming“
