half of me for growth, the other for decay
I knew from the moment I came into this world — the hunger, the aching, the taste of poison against my teeth.
This girl — I do not think this girl knows. I do not think she has tasted nightshade or run with risen things beneath a full moon. She has not snapped a sparrow’s neck or weaved its bones through another unicorn’s mane.
But I could teach her.
This girl — I do not think this girl knows. I do not think she has tasted nightshade or run with risen things beneath a full moon. She has not snapped a sparrow’s neck or weaved its bones through another unicorn’s mane.
But I could teach her.
T
here has always seemed to her a certain sweetness about the taste of poison. Like honey, or pollen, or rose-hip tea; like the flowers her father grew for them that always fermented like syrup on her tongue. But it was what came next that was sweeter than the taste of it.
The quickening of her heart as her veins turned to brambles and roots tangled together. The tingling of her skin like she had only ever been a thing in the middle of metamorphosis, a butterfly ready to tear its old body apart to escape (but Isolt knows it would not be a butterfly climbing out from the corpse of her. it would be something far more terrible, far more lovely, far more monstrous than that.) The way the whole world narrowed itself down to the petals caught between her teeth, the way all that mattered was one more taste, one more drop —
one more slip of death between her ribcage.
She is waiting.
She is laying flowers along her own grave. She is watching Elliana dance overtop of it like she was holiness rotting away in the ground. But oh! how much sweeter it would be to see the child rotting beside her, to see the blue of her eyes replaced with monkshood and bluebells.
How much sweeter it might taste then, when Isolt grinds petals between her teeth and commands her to rise, rise from your grave and be mine.
Elliana is not ready but oh, she could be. And she would be there to show her how gentle death could be, and how splendid the immortality that falls like seeds from between her teeth would feel. All she had to do was say yes and Isolt’s waiting, her aching, her hungering, all of it would be over.
The blade of her tail twitches, ready to carve flower after flower after flower from her twisted stalks and offer it like medicine down the girl’s throat instead of poison. But not yet — not yet — not yet. Elliana’s day was coming. But today Isolt could give her a taste of it.
Her smile turns sharp and feral. Already her cardinal flower is blooming again, twin flowers rising from the cleaved-off head of the first like a many-headed monster. Another quick cut and they are floating beside the first (and as the next begin to bloom she feels her heart stutter, feels her lungs begin to tremble like flowers drying in a windowsill. She wonders if this is how her sister feels, before the nosebleeds start; she wonders if Elliana would taste her blood with the flowers if she offered it.)
“Of course.” There are too many promises in her eyes, too many warnings in her voice, in her teeth when she smiles, in her horn as it lowers to the flowers and spears one through its center. This she passes to Elliana until the petals (and the spine-sharp tip of her horn) brush against her lips.
She is watching her when she eats.
She is waiting when the first shiver of wildfire courses down her throat, and her heart begins to whine like a dying thing, and poison-pollen drips from her teeth.
