I S O L T
—
Maybe I would have chosen differently.
Maybe that is only a lie I tell myself.
I
solt does not feel like a princess, or a daughter, or even a girl when she walks down the streets of her father’s city. She does not feel like a thing born at all, or someone who has ever known innocence in the days of their youth. Perhaps it is right, then, that her father’s people should stare at her like she is other, and fall silent when they see her approaching. Maybe they can see in each predatory step (like she has never known how to walk, only ever how to stalk after her prey), or the shine of her hungry horn when she lowers her head and leads with it. If she were them, if she had ever learned how to look at the world with a mortal’s eyes, and a mortal’s fear of death — she might not have blamed them then for running when they see the shadow of it hunting among them.
As it is, every pair of eyes that turn hurriedly from her’s is another she feeds to the raging thing growing in her belly. She turns her sorrow into swords by which to carve off bits of their flesh for a meal to feed it. And it eats, and it eats, and it eats, and soon enough Isolt finds herself looking for more and more to feed to it.
She is wandering the city again with that searching look in her eyes and that roaring in her chest. Again and again she feels her hooves clipping against the cobblestones, and even when she does not turn back she knows how they crack and turn blackened in her wake, how the bits of algae and mold creep in to fill those gaps. Back and forth through the city she paces, never slowing, never relenting from dawn till dusk —
or she would have, had she not seen him.
A man standing upon the roots of one of her father’s trees (a tree both he and her sister loved), staring up into its outstretched branches. He does not turn to look her way when her footsteps sound upon the ground behind him, he does not look at her with the frightened gaze of a rabbit knowing the fox was walking just above its den.
He looks no different than the other mortals of this place, and yet he does not fear her. Perhaps, he does not yet know he should. But Isolt, the new-god, true-god, made-monster that she is, would teach him.
She does not announce herself.
She does not say a single word to this boy who does not yet realize he should be running (running, like all the others who hastily turn away from the king’s daughter and the violence in her eyes.)
Isolt only curls the blade of her tail like a claw around the trunk of that tree, peeling off bits of bark like skin to scar. And there it tap, tap, taps a warning to him.
rotting and rooting
wilting and blooming
@Ceylon
