I can see him slipping away. His antlers collapsing to dust at the tines, but it is more than that — it is something in his soul. Something between his heartbeats. There is a part of him that is missing.
If I were a kinder god, I would try to fill that gap between his ribs. But I am not made to be kind. That gap is where I will place my horn, and that missing piece of him is the very thing by which I will unmake him. His sorrow is the thing I will fill my belly with.
If I were a kinder god, I would try to fill that gap between his ribs. But I am not made to be kind. That gap is where I will place my horn, and that missing piece of him is the very thing by which I will unmake him. His sorrow is the thing I will fill my belly with.
Isolt is consuming his stuttering heartbeat.
That is what it feels like, when she feels her’s begin to speed up at the same time his begins to slow. The taste of him is like honey beneath her lips, even when the dust of his antlers coats her tongue and speckles her jaw.
This death — his death — is not the same as that of the elks, or mountain lions, or does she had hunted. His death is sweeter, something meant to be savored, something meant to be sacred in the only way that Isolt knows to make something holy. Oh, her tail aches to carve a line across his throat, her horn hungers for the feel of his ribs pressing on either side of it and his heart gasping on the end of it. But his death is not something she wants to rush.
His death means more than that, to her.
Already she is imagining what he will look like with daisy-eyes and wisteria blooming from his cuts. When she looks at him she can see her sister’s growth holding the pieces of him together, flowers filling all the places where his sorrows and pains were once held. She can hear the creaking of his vine-and-root joints as he runs through the forest with them as a risen thing held up by their shoulders pressed to either side of his.
It is so close — she can see it between his heartbeats. Between his lungs. Between his breaths.
And she is there as he wilts, ready to catch him when he falls at last, ready to tuck his sorrow between his teeth like clover, like one last thing to take to the grave.
She is stepping forward, her horn lowering, when the magic comes suddenly awake. Isolt springs back as though burned. And when she looks down and sees the new growth of the river, the growth that grows as fast as her rot, that grows faster —
the smile on her lips turns to a snarl. The life of a dead thing was for her sister, and for her alone. Not some woodland boy who has already vowed to give her his death.
“Tell me which of us is the liar,” she hisses. The life that grows around him is pressing in against her legs, pressing her backwards, pressing her away. The risen fish grows fangs, pulls its lily-stalk-rope tighter around his legs. “I could give you more than life.”
But the red of her eyes is promising only violence now.
@Leonidas
"wilting // blooming"
"wilting // blooming"
