ISOLT
It should scare me that I wish she would take me.
There is a song in violence in which she is learning. A song that sinks down into the marrow of her when the creature’s antlers crack against her cheek, like she is a leech pulling it out through his blood and bone. She breathes it in and feels it writhing there in her lungs, the notes of life and death, the gong of war calling her to come forth, to come and learn how to turn every drop of her pain to rage.
So she comes. And in her bloody gaze that is swung to the side she sees her mother who has already learned the song. So she learns. She lets the notes of it fill her veins, to tangle leg-to-leg and horn-to-horn with the magic that festers in her heart. It drowns the parts of her that were born in violence.
And in the blood that drip, drip, drips down from the curl of her jaw and onto the forest floor, it boils.
There is a snarl already on her lips when she turns to face the elk again. And with the war-drum beat her mother is carving out for her from a tree (the notes of that violent song she wants to learn more than she wants to live), Isolt again lunges for the throat a thing that does not yet know it is dying. This time, the swing of her horn is faster than the swing of his antlers. And she does not miss.
As the blood cascades down her brow and fills every hollow, hungry curl of her horn, she thinks of it like an anointment. She has seen the priests of the court anoint each other in oils, mark their brows with marks of the sun, of life, of rebirth. She has heard the prayers they whispered over one another. Never has she thought them more false than she does today, with the true-life running in split rivers down her face and a living thing tearing itself into pieces on her horn. Isolt, young, made Isolt knows more of gods than the false priests of this world. She knows death (and the unicorns who wear it on their lips in place of a kiss) is the only god that should matter to a mortal.
And this is how she learns that she is not a thing made to be loved, but another thing made to rend, and ruin, and consume: in the way she grasps the bull elk’s antler (the same one that had carved a line into her cheek) between her teeth. And when she lays the blade of her tail at the base of it and even while he struggles and his dying sounds split the night apart, begins to saw. With each cut she makes she is counting. With each deepening cut she is draining the song from his marrow. With each drop of blood that wets her lips she is learning how to consume the notes of it.
The elk is still at last when she lifts her head and carries his bloody antler back to her mother-monster and drops it at her feet.
And as the blood — both her’s and the dead thing’s — drip from her brow, there is a part of her that is still searching, as she lifts her eyes to Thana’s.
