isolt.
Somedays that wish is the only thing that stops me from tearing the heart from another unicorn’s chest.
In each perfect dahlia that blooms at her sister’s touch there is a whisper of violence. Isolt can see it there buried between the layers of petals, as it blooms from fermented bones and dead stars and lost wishes, like a speck of rot for her to grow into an army. She is watching it, searching for it, as flower after flower after flower raises itself like Lazarus against the mirrors.And she is following her sister (always she would follow her, like a snake eating its own tail, or death chasing after life chasing after death) when she moves to press her shoulder like a kiss to the skeleton mirror. She is following her because she is afraid that if she doesn’t, she might be lost from her, never to find her way back, never to curb the sickness rising in her throat like a plague for her to infect the world with.
She is following her even when she knows that it will cause the death of more than one of her perfect flowers.
And oh! how that magic of her’s reaches now like a thing that has been starved for so long, too long, long enough for its hunger to turn to rage. It races like spiders down her sister’s neck and falls upon the mirror like a wave ready to tear it down, drowning her all the way down.
Not these, she whispers to that black pit frothing in her chest, not her. And she begs her magic to reach for something — anything — other than the flower shivering on the winter bones. She begs her magic to dull its teeth against her own ribs, to eat away at whatever softness was left in her own lungs before it turned itself on her sister’s creations.
And she knows it is working by the way her heart trembles and hardens. When she rolls her eye back in its socket to look at that other-unicorn it is there in the look of agony making her jaw clench tighter, and tighter, and tighter.
“We are,” the darkness in the mirrors, the sound of shattering bones in the distance, the roar of a beast deep in the ocean. She can feel the saliva coating her teeth when she lifts her chin from her sister’s back and stares the other-unicorn down with her bloody gaze. “Isolt.” And she knows her sister will finish the rest for her when she stops to swallow down the drool.
She always does.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
