I feel like the fires tonight, as dawn creeps closer and chokes them out with fistfuls of sand thrown onto the coals instead of wood. As their flames burn lower, and lower, and lower, but nonetheless hungry. Nonetheless burning.
I feel like the fires —
waiting to be fed.
I feel like the fires —
waiting to be fed.
T
he night has slipped into an echo of bonfires that had earlier reached brightly into the sky. The embers of them glow hungrily in their pits, staring out like a monster of eyes and teeth begging to be fed. But those teeth grow duller, and their eyes less bright, as one by one of them are starved. Somewhere the sun is waiting to rise.
Somehow the night is holding on a little longer.
And Isolt wonders if this was how Caligo felt, when her rage kept the sun from rising all those years ago. She wonders if one day she could be angry enough to smother even the sun.
She thinks she might.
As the flames burn lower and the smoke weeping off of them thickens, Isolt wanders. Around and around the dying flames laid out in a pattern she does not try to decipher, pausing to stare into the blinking coals of each one and to blink back at them. They seem strangely alive to her — dying things who’s death is drawing near, who’s death she can sense the same way she can sense a bleeding hare in the forest.
And she does not save them. Perhaps it is because she had seen the sorrow in her sister’s eye, when young and old tree-gods alike had been sacrificed to the flames. Maybe it is only because Isolt had never been made for the saving of things, not even a hungry fire that reminds her a little bit of herself.
But she cannot shake the feeling that she is searching for something as she turns from one fire to the next. Something that goes below the magic coiled in her belly, that runs in currents beneath the wave of anger that festers like a rot-filled river through her heart. It feels like a thing she has seen in glimpses in her twin’s eyes, that had always made her look too long and too hard, as if by looking hard enough she might begin to see the marrow of it.
So back and forth across the field she walks, with her tail blade carving out shapes into the beaten earth behind her (shapes that might have shown her the answer, had she turned back to look at them in the same way she looked at the sorrow in Danaë’s eyes.) And each fire only makes that broken feeling in her chest grow wider and wider like a ravine splitting open. Her heart feels like an overripe berry splitting against her twin’s lips. And still she searches, as her lungs turn to flower petals hung up to dry and the roots of them press against her bones. Still that sorrow she does not know how to name mourns when she cannot find the sickness carving away pieces of her.
But when she falls to her knees before the last fire, she thinks she has found it.
It is carved there in the shape of a unicorn in the embers, its glowing red body broken up only by the white ash of the coals in a pattern she wishes she did not recognize.
« from my rotting corpse. »
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