Every night there are monsters waiting for me in the shadows. I do not see them, blackness wrapped in a deeper blackness; but I can feel them. I can hear them whispering to me, calling me out to them, calling me beneath the surface of that too-black-mouth waiting to swallow me.
So I sink into it. I sink into the darkness, into the sound of their voices wrapped around me like a blanket, I sink into all those slices of almost-death waiting to devour me. I sink—
So I sink into it. I sink into the darkness, into the sound of their voices wrapped around me like a blanket, I sink into all those slices of almost-death waiting to devour me. I sink—
I
nto the belly of the darkness, where hunger grows black spires like the ribs of a church twisted around her. She cannot see in that darkness, where black is layered over black like the inside of a buried casket. Somewhere in that darkness there are shadow-wolves circling her, and bramblebears smiling with rooted teeth, and a great owl watching her with wisteria eyes when it clacks its beak and begins to screech. But she can hear them, all of them — she can feel their bones trembling like her own as they press closer, and closer, and closer. She does not sleep like a princess should, or a unicorn, or a thing that has ever known softness.
Isolt sleeps like the dead.
And she does not dream in the way mortals should dream — but in memories. She dreams in the wolves’ impatience and the bramblebear’s hunger, in the infinite knowing of the still-screeching owl. When she lays down in the middle of them all and listens, there is something else moving in all that almost-blackness, something that does not feel like herself the way all her other dream-monsters do —
It is the touch of her sister that brings her awake like rising from the shadows and walking out of the nothingness of her own dreams (like she is walking instead, into Danaë’s.) And it is not the owl she hears screeching at her, but the soft breaths of her twin, with her heartbeat echoing in sparrow-quick beats inside of her own chest. Her body does not feel like her own, when she blinks the darkness from her gaze and presses her horn into her sister’s lips.
“What is it saying this time?” she has never been as good at understanding the sighs of the roots or the creaking of the branches over their heads. Isolt was always too busy hunting down the bones buried beneath the trees, the half-dead things haunting between them. When she presses her ear to Danaë’s throat she thinks, for a moment, that she might hear that song of the forest that lives in her twin and in her father. But louder than that, she hears —
the roar of a monster, crying out to her —
the song of death creeping up the edges of diseased leaves —
her sister’s heart, becoming less-sparrow and more an echo of that roar —
It makes her own heart race to catch the pace of it. So she swallows the darkness of her shadow-monsters and climbs to her feet, to strain at the true-monster hiding in the dark, moonlit forest with the same hunger of her sister. Only Isolt does not wait (she has never known how to) before sinking herself like an arrow into the shadows stretching between the trees. She presses her shoulder into Danaë’s like a tide of that black-sea sweeping her deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the darkness with her.
The forest opens up like a mouth before them, and as Isolt runs she imagines that each tree is a tooth rising sharp and hungry to nip at her. When a branch tangles in her mane she thinks it is the bitter forest trying to keep its hidden monster from her.
But she knows with all the knowing of the screeching owl from her dreams, it will not keep her at bay for long.
« from my rotting corpse. »
« r » | @danaë