i I met a unicorn once who smelled like the sea. She had asked if I wanted to see the waves with her, had offered to show me how death looked lying like flotsam at the bottom of it. But the sea is no place for a unicorn.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have said yes, yes, yes, and followed her into it instead.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have said yes, yes, yes, and followed her into it instead.
I
solt is thinking of the sea, as she stands in her spring forest and listens to the hush, hush, hush of leaves all around her. In it she can hear the echo of the ocean (of the waves she has only ever glimpsed beneath her as she crossed the bridge to that terrible, wonderful island in the sea.) She curls her tail around a young birch tree, watching the paper bark begin to curl and darken. The point of her tail taps against its trunk like she is knocking on the tree’s soul, leaning close to whisper are you awake? into the knot of one of it’s eyes.That eye only stares back at her, unblinking. Unseeing.
But when she carves a line into the tree’s side and watches sap rush to fill the wound, and a starling startles from its crown and lifts high, high, higher into the sky —
the scattering of leaves that rain around her reminds her of the weeping sea.
She waits until the tree crumbles around the death-spot she bloomed in its trunk, until the quiet forest is filled with the keening sound of a falling cousin. She waits until the leaves are crying down like tears all around her and the earth shakes as it catches the weight of it. And then she steps quietly over the still-trembling branches of its carcass.
Somewhere in the distance is the weeping sea — her father has told her of the way the forest grows up to its very edge, the way some trees have braved the brine and reach farther and farther out into the bay. Today she will see it.
The forest falls silent around her, and Isolt imagines the trees are turning their backs to her as she passes. Another day she might have cut lines into them all, she might have turned the drops of rot in her veins to a river of it flooding the copse of birch trees, choking their roots, severing their arms from their bodies. She might have punished them for being foolish enough to think themselves safe from her.
But today she only presses her teeth into the eye of one young-tree and whispers to it, some day. Some day she would be back for them.
But today she lets them live.
Behind her, before her, in the green-dappled light beyond her shadow, the forest rejoices. And it is in the rejoicing, singing forest that she finds him again.
She watches him from the shadows for some time. He is taller than when she last saw him: his shoulders are broader, his wings are muscled from flight. He does not cower in the darkness like he had before. He stands before the carved face of an oak, his own eyes closed — but it is the lines of his face that make her pause.
Isolt has never learned to pray. She is not sure she knows what a prayer is (rarely do people pray to her, to death, to the unicorn in the woods.) So she comes closer, and closer, and curls her tail around that great-oak. As the first spot of rot blooms across it’s bark, she wonders if he can hear it in his prayers.
“You are a long way from home,” she tells him. But she knows she has found the sea.
from my rotting corpse
