Perhaps it should worry me, that I am become a monster. Perhaps it should scare me that there is only one thing is this world (one thing) that can stop me from destroying this entire land and myself in the process. Perhaps I should try harder to not be this thing, this wolf who cannot pick up its jaw from the path of destruction laid before it.
But oh! the look in their eyes when I come closer -- when their death comes closer -- will never let me stop.
But oh! the look in their eyes when I come closer -- when their death comes closer -- will never let me stop.
The willows growing along the banks begin to bend, their spines twisting like priests bowing their heads to their god of death. She can feel them leaning in around her — can feel their branches, leaves sloughing off like diseased skin, trailing along her back. They wilt until the river is full of their tears, until it seems as though at any moment they might collapse into the river in the only sort of baptism Isolt understands.
She does not know how to make it stop. If her sister were here she might have, all of her magic focused on one single oak by which she might lay waste to if only for the joy of seeing her sister’s wisteria grow from its corpse (with blooms brighter and more beautiful than any her father might hope to grow.) She might have dragged herself from the river so that the sight of it carrying all her rot away wouldn’t kindle that rage that begs her, always begs her, to replace the stolen with more, and more, and more.
She might have recognized the warning signs in her bones as her own disease, waiting to consume her as quickly as it consumes the pondgrass tangled around her legs.
But Isolt is thinking of none of this when she tilts her head at the pegasus (her pegasus, as she would come to know him as, her wild thing who she would one day shackle.) She is thinking only of the risen fish with algae scales that bumps itself against her fetlock and weaves between her steps. There is only one — as if even the river, as if even her magic is trying to remind her that she is only one of twins.
The river laps at her belly, painting her sides with algae and rotten petals. It feels to her as if she can feel the rot inside of her trembling, pressing itself against her ribs, reaching through to link hands with the rot of the river.
So she takes another step closer. And she makes no effort to swallow back down the plague that wants to bleed through her lips like tar over the world.
“Do you not see already?” the fish takes a lily stem between its teeth and threads it around the boys front legs, bumping its skeletal body against his. “He is free. All of them are free. Free from the pain of life, of loss, of love —“ her horn aches to lay itself against his skin like a prayer, but she whispers to it still not yet, not yet, not yet.
Instead she lifts her muzzle to his antlers — the way they’ve dulled the way the sun does as it sinks lower, like gold that has tarnished. But it has not tarnished enough for her, not until her sister’s flowers blooming from the spine of them are the brightest part. So she skims her lips down the smooth curl of one tine, and waits to see what rot blooms in her wake.
"What do you ail from, Leonidas? I could take it all away.”
And in her eyes is a whisper of a promise, blood red dangerously close to his gold.
@Leonidas
"wilting // blooming"
"wilting // blooming"
