I am finding the pit of my own sorrow tonight, the one that lies beneath the hunger, beneath the rage, beneath the endless need to become. I wonder if this makes me more like my sister now, if it is making me soft — I wonder if I should let it.
B
eneath her knees the ground feels like a rotten thing, trampled by the hooves of the many horses dancing around the flames, singed by the fires each time they flared. There is soot and bits of kindling pressing patterns against her skin, bruising her legs where they press too sharply into her.Lichen begins to bloom like flowers around her knees. Mushrooms rise on long and slender stems like the true-ghosts of the night. The last splinters of logs that had escaped the fires turn now to ash beneath her touch.
And Isolt stares into the dying flames at the unicorn that is dying with them.
She wants to stir the embers with her horn, to make the unicorn rise and run, run, run away from the flames. She wants to breathe life into her the way she breathes life into the dead, to beg her to become in a way she never can. She wants — oh Isolt wants a thousand things, a hundred feelings other than this hunger, a fire that gives as much as it takes, a heart that beats like the wing’s of a sparrow soaring to freedom instead of thundering like an eagle going to war.
The red unicorns wants a horn that feels more a weight than a weapon.
She stares down at the sooty unicorn and wishes she could take her place.
And she is leaning forward, reaching into the dying embers, her horn falling, falling, falling towards it, when the voice interrupts her. Isolt flinches, an ear flickering back towards the girl from the island (another unicorn that does not belong here, not in her court of death chasing after life chasing after death.) Even beneath the soot, beneath the smoke in her voice, she recognizes her. The beat of her heart, too-fast and too-strong, too full of life beneath her fragile skin, oh it calls to her.
Isolt would always recognize the things she has marked for death.
She does not turn to greet her. She does not whisper a hello back to the unicorn, or lift her eyes from the mirror she imagines the fire to be. It is not until Aspara leans closer (closer enough that Isolt might count each eyelash fluttering against her cheek when she blinks), and blows gently against the coals that she finally turns to her.
It is as if she stoked the dying bonfire in her own chest, instead of the one before them.
“Do not,” the snarl rises unbidden to her lips, an instinct; she almost cannot stop the way her tail again becomes a weapon, singing through the air as it races to the girl.
But then she blinks.
The blade of her tail falls to the ground with a sigh. And the snarl withers in her throat like a leaf in autumn, sinking down into the depths of her. She swallows, and tastes ash.
And when she speaks again her voice is a whisper, a broken thing that feels as though it has burned as low as the fires. “Let it die.” And she tosses her wants, her wishes, her aches into the dying fire so that they, too, might die with it.
« from my rotting corpse. »
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