ISOLT
There is a moment in which her heart seems to hold its breath, when she first lets the weight of the antler fall to the loamy soil and lifts her ruby gaze to the amethysts of her mother-monster. She can feel her lungs trembling like dying leaves waiting for winter to tear them loose. The wolf-pack and murder-birds in her bones fall silent.
And with a patience she did not know she possessed, she waits.
Until Eligos tempers his snarl at their feet, and Thana drags a bloody line from horn to jaw with her lips. Until that song of violence comes rushing to fill her veins, echoing in her jaw without the feel of the antlers to grind her teeth against. Isolt does not smile, but the feral joy is there in the way her eyes turn brighter, and in the wildcat that sighs and licks its teeth in her belly.
There is no religion in the blood dripping down her cheek, but if there was it would be the closest thing to a baptism that she would understand. In its place there is something more, something that is more arcane, and more primal. There is the glory of a unicorn learning her place in this world (and it is between the heartbeats of a dying thing and its final breath.)
She stares into Eligos’ golden eyes and blinks once. Only once. Like a monster welcoming another monster home.
“Now I understand.”
The words are a poor replacement for the feeling that is racing through her veins. But she echoes them like a daughter that is learning how to be like her mother. And with only one last look over her shoulder at the elk’s carcass (a mournful look, for she wants to lay down and feast, and feast, and gorge herself on the last of his life that is still draining from him), she turns into the gloaming darkness after the first unicorn. But before she follows her, the blade of her tail hooks around the antler she had carved from the dying elk and drags it along behind her.
Later she will show it to her sister — and with it she will teach her to rend, and ruin, and consume in the way of the unicorns.
