I have always wondered what it is about the desert that holds my father’s heart in its fist. Why he should love it so when it refuses to speak to him, to sing for him, to grow the flowers which the forest gives him so readily.
I asked him once, if it was hate instead of love that drew him here, that maybe he did not know the difference between the two.
He had only looked at me, in his quiet way, and told me to go and see it for myself.
I asked him once, if it was hate instead of love that drew him here, that maybe he did not know the difference between the two.
He had only looked at me, in his quiet way, and told me to go and see it for myself.
S
o it is that Isolt comes to the desert with her father’s words echoing in her mind. So it is that she is searching for that nameless thing he has found here, the thing that has wrapped itself like a rope around his heart that she is determined to cut. The blade of her tail carves lines into the sand in her wake, a whisper of violence carving the night apart. It fills and it breaks the silence.
And if the dunes were singing (as her father liked to say they did), they fall silent now when she walks among them.
There is a part of her that will forever understand the violence that echoes in every grain of sand in a way only a unicorn made would know. The wind howling across the dunes is singing the law of the desert to her in all the bright and hungry notes of death. It is screaming as it whistles down the curl of her blade and it makes some part of her, some festering pool of rot barely contained in her chest, break itself open and spill out upon the sand.
She leaves trails of it as she walks, specks of mold and ash filling the scars her tail blade cuts into the sand. And in every shadow of sand and sliver of moonlight arcing across the desert, she is searching for something for her rot to consume, searching for that thing her father loves so much.
Isolt is still searching when she finds the trail of another, of life running parallel to her death. And like the true-death, the true-god that she is, she chases after it.
And she wonders all the way to the Oasis if this is what Ipomoea loves about Solterra.
This thrill of the hunt, this thrill of the violence of the sand calling put to the violence etched into her bones. This, oh this she understands, when she stops at the bank of the pool and lets the water kiss her hooves (like a sinner crawling to the feet of its priest.) That understanding roars in her chest when she watches the man lift his head above the water like another god of the desert. The moonlight turns the water streaming down his face to quicksilver, to god-blood, to the oils of his anointing.
She waits until he comes closer to speak. “Why did you wash the blood away.” Her voice does not lilt the way a question should. It only runs straight as a spear racing for the man’s throat, quieter than the whisper of her tail still carving lines in the sand. And were it not for the glow of her bloody eyes in the moonlight, like wolves waiting in the darkness, he might have seen the second question that lingers below the first.
The wanting of her hungry heart that asks why would you want to forget?
rotting and rooting
wilting and blooming
wilting and blooming
