half of me for growth, the other for decay
I know what comes next. I have always known: it is the sickness, the too-quick beat of her heart, the song in her chest that is calling, calling, calling to me. I could end it. By petal or by blade I could end it. It is the way of things.
But I do not. Why do I not?
But I do not. Why do I not?
T
here is something burning in her veins, and Isolt knows it both is and it is not the poison.lt whispers to her as it crawls through the chambers of her heart, and settles like plague in black specks on her lungs. That magic, her lovely and terrible beast of a magic, stretching itself out to fill even her smallest capillaries.
Somewhere Isolt is smiling. And she is spreading her arms open wide to welcome it into her. Every burning, festering drop of it finding a home in her blood.
That magic, she knows, does not know how to relent. She knows it would destroy this girl with a smile if she allowed it to, one precious, poisonous petal at a time. It is only now as she watches elliana eat the flower, and eat, and eat, and eat — only now does she begin to think that maybe the does not want that.
Isolt who is ready to consume the world, Isolt who is always trying to devour the sun, devour the moon, devour their life; Isolt is not sure she wants Elliana to die.
Later she might blame it on the way the magic grows fainter and fainter in her grasp, how her heart begins to stutter and with every beat lost so too does she lose a little more of her control over it. Her already-twisted flowers begin to curl in upon themselves, petals once bright and bloody and brilliant becoming as black and dry as ash. The stalks begin to shrivel and wilt beneath the weight of their diseased bounty.
Isolt was not made to create life. With each second it slips further and further from her. And she wishes, on how she wishes her sister was here to keep the blooms alive for her.
But Danaë is carving the heads from her own tulips somewhere. And so Isolt sighs, and with that hollow, hungry look turning every edge of her face sharp again, she lets go. And she watches as the rot swallows the cardinal flowers whole, as it collapses into all that black-death-circle she has created around them. The poison taste lingers on her lips.
"Now," her voice is the soft hush of a funeral shroud being pulled over a dead girl's face, "you run. You run until you find a flower to take home with you. Run and find your mother, Elliana." And this, she knows, she cannot help her with.
Elliana will not find a tulip here in Isolt’s circle of death. And perhaps that makes her a little sad — but what does a young god of death know of sadness?
