I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins.
I am running with claws digging into the forest loam instead of hooves. And I am searching the shadows with daisy-eyes instead of rubies, as seeds fall from between my teeth and I clack my jaws together because I need more than roots to fill them.
I am not a unicorn tonight. I am risen.
I am not a unicorn tonight. I am risen.
S
lipping into the hunt is as easy as slipping into hunger, and violence, and the shadows that are all too hungry to receive her. And slipping into the hunt with her shoulder pressed to their risen monster, and his other shoulder pressed to her twin’s, comes as naturally as the rot that spreads out in patterns that echo flowers in each half-moon of her steps.There is no space left between them. There is no difference between the unicorn’s inhale and the bramblebear’s exhale. There is no difference—
they are One when they step into the forest and smile a terrible, three-headed smile with rot and seeds and petals falling from each of their teeth. If Isolt had thought she knew hunger before it is nothing compared to the famine roaring out in pain in the belly of the monster panting between their shoulders (no, not between them — with them, his breath fetid and burning in her own lungs.)
If it was her hunger and her hunger alone there would be nothing to stop her from turning to the blood-trail and dragging every rabbit, and sparrow, and fox kit from their dens with claw and fang. There would be nothing to stop her from filling her hunger on every wood-mouse and blood-root, and bathing herself in the mess their hearts make when she cuts them open. But her hunger is not her own tonight.
And tonight she does not relent. Tonight there is no difference between unicorn and god and sister and risen and monster. Tonight she is listening to the sun-pollen spore of her heart as it begs her this one, this one, only this one. All around the forest is echoing with the songs of ancient-hungers and age-old-hunts and monsters-that-should-not-have-been-disturbed. And the sound of it is a thrill they takes between their teeth and pull.
The hunting is as joyous as the killing. So they hunt, and they run, and they track, and each step that edges them closer to the mountain lion at the end of the trail is another seed cracking between their teeth.
Ahead Isolt can hear the snarl of the mountain lion (can feel the earth shuddering as the blood of another rabbit drenches it). And it is not her voice that snarls back at it, but the voice of a risen thing echoing in three throats. Together their rage tells the lion that one was not your's to take.
And they will make it pay for it in the only way they know how: a life for a life, sating their hunger with the flesh of another hungry beast.
