from my rotting corpse
There has always been a part of me that intimately knows when something is about to die. A part of my soul that draws me like a rope to the graves of forgotten things, the ones that will make the best risen beasts. A witch-woman called it my death sense; but I call it my monster.
And always —
And always —
Always, Isolt is following death.
She chases it now, as any true-god wrapped in a unicorn's skin might, when she hears the whisper of it racing on ahead of her. Her magic comes alive with a snarl inside of her, wrapping its claws around her ribs, frothing between her lungs. And then —
it begins to pull.
One rib after the other like a wild thing pulling apart the bars of its cage. She is not settled as the whirlpool of it floods her veins. She is not content when she snarls her monster's snarl and lifts her horn like an arrow racing towards that dead-voice carried to her on the wind.
She is not a tame thing bowing to her hanger, or her rage, or her need to rend and ruin and consume. Isolt takes it all between her teeth and bites down on it.
And as she follows that whispering trail of death that calls to her, always, she is making her own trail. Flowers wilt in the heat of her gaze when she turns on them, and the heads of prairie grasses heavy with their seed-pod-crowns fall to the sharp edge of her tail blade. Watching eyes are carved from the faces of the young-birch trees that she passes. In her hoof steps rot blooms like wild flowers, dark and ravenous and choking out the life they grow upon.
And if there is a moment in which she pauses at the edge of her forest and looks out on all that space, all that grass, all those dreaming buffalo dotting the prairie like wishes — it is only to think to herself how ripe the killing field is today. And as Isolt steps out into all that openness, she is counting graves as she begins to run.
She does not linger to see the way the sleeping buffalo come awake and watch her with their prey-eyes who know the predator is running through their midst. And she does not turn from her course when the fox springs free of the grass before her and his from her shadow (but oh! Oh how she wants to.) Isolt only lopes with her killing-gait with her horn leading the way from her, leading her to the boy with death chained around his neck like a noose.
The trees of the copse begin to creak and groan when she steps between them. But it is the barking, the sound of a creature that is foolish enough to not see her right fully as god, that has her own snarl rising as warning in her throat. Her tail lashes like a whip against her legs.
"What is his name?" her voice is flat, deceptively calm despite the monster still pulling apart her ribs, begging to escape. She always did like to know the names of things before she condemned them to their graves.
@khier
"wilting // blooming"
