I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins.
Perhaps in some buried part of me, I can remember parts of the story the castle-keeper had told us. Perhaps deep down in my bones I am listening again to the rage he told us about, of the buried hungers, of the violence the mortals of this court tried to destroy.
I think maybe I can hear the song of it now. And it is the only song I wish to listen to, like a war song in place of the cradle lulling me into dreams of blood.
I think maybe I can hear the song of it now. And it is the only song I wish to listen to, like a war song in place of the cradle lulling me into dreams of blood.
T
he bramblebear’s hunger becomes her own. It drowns out every bit of the aching she had known before, hollows out a stomach she had already thought empty (but now, oh now she knows there was still more for it to feed from.) And she can feel her sister’s hunger just on the other side of that bony scapula she presses her shoulder to, running in all the same discordant notes as her own. She can feel it echoing down in her bones, twisting around her hunger, around the bramblebear’s, around the song of the forest, until all of it is so woven she cannot tell one from the other. It is better this way, she thinks as they move as one through the midnight forest. It is better that they should not be able to tell one from the other. That they should press themselves together so tightly the difference between them is made obsolete, that they should become one.
And one they become.
They snarl together, three mouths attached to one body, to one soul, to one mind. They rake through paw through the loamy earth and scratch the dirt as a warning to the mountain lion. Together their twin tails whistle through the night air, carving lines into trees, into their own skin, into their raspberry chests — it does not matter which. They feel all of it and none of it, as their pollen-spore heart glows all the brighter like a sun between their rotting ribs.
Like a sun, they will consume. Like a sun, they will destroy everything in their path. Like a sun, they will become the gods of this forest.
So they lunge. And they crack bones between their jaw. And they swallow down the blood and the flesh and the life of a thing that had gone too long without seeing the rightful god of the forest that it had begun to believe she was the god. And oh, how right it is that they teach her otherwise, how good it is to awaken all the ancient stories and buried hungers that this world had foolishly forgotten, had naively thought itself safe from.
Somewhere, Isolt can feel her bones growing weary. Somewhere she is still herself, and slipping further and further away from the magic knitting them all together like stitches in an open wound. Somewhere she is falling asleep to dreams of blood and hunger.
But with her magic still twisted in the chest of the bramblebear with her twin’s, she feasts. She feasts until the darkness consumes her.
