ISOLT
My father does, I know — he tells me so every time he hears the desert calling out to him, like it is looking for the missing bits of sand caught in his soul. He tells me some things in this world are not meant to be escaped.
I tell him the scholars say that about death. And we prove them wrong every time we raise another sparrow, and wolf pup, and bramblebear from their forest graves. We are the fate others cannot escape.
The night feels endless, the fires seem to go on forever with their smoke and flames tangling together into the sky. It reminds her of her twin, the way they tangle leg-to-leg and horn-to-horn each night, the way her own dreams feel like running through smoke alongside her shadow (or sometimes how she is the shadow, formless in the smoke.)
The night feels like a thing she wants to name, because she wants to hold the names of all things close before she lays them into their graves.
And so she searches for it, for the name with which she’ll wrap around the night like a noose. She searches for it in every bonfire, in every silver-eyed shed star, in every whispered prayer over a knotted bundle of a rosemary and lavender offering.
She searches until she finds the girl from the forest, the one wearing death as easily as another girl may wear pearls, and jewels, and silks. And all the while the aching, and the hunger, and the sorrow caught between her teeth starts to crack and bleed. She can taste it on her tongue; each time she swallows it down she imagines it beginning to root in her belly. And Isolt wonders what it would grow into, all these sorrow-seeds: would they become her sister’s dahlias and poppies? Would they grow into golden saplings shivering with rotting and budding leaves in the forest?
Would they grow twisted, and monstrous, like everything else she touches?
She thinks it would make a better offering than the rosemary and lavender and herbs. She thinks she could teach this crow-girl to say the words with her, to pray to death instead of life (to breathe life into all the dead foxes of the world, instead of burying them in shallow graves.)
But oh, it would feel just as good (better, she tells herself) to taste this girl’s death on her tongue instead of sorrow. And it is then that Isolt knows it is not Maybird’s prayers she wants —
she wants something far more eternal than that.
A cold smile hangs onto the backs of her teeth when she steps closer, and closer, and taps out a heartbeat along her hip (the girl’s heartbeat, not her own.) And she drinks in the site of her crow’s head, bathed in red and gold tonight by the flames, eyes dancing brightly in their sockets. It matches the hellebores, she thinks; and later she will imagine what they look like tucked between her teeth.
“Were you looking for me?” She does not bow, or dip her horn, or smile at this girl who was foolish enough to believe herself dead. There is only a warning in the way she lifts her head, so that the smoke might fill the hollows of her horn and dance along her brow. Because she is still searching, and she thinks this girl might fill her hunger just as well as the night would.
The thought makes her eyes feel like twin ranunculi, blooming fire-bright against her skull.
@maybird !
"wilting // blooming"
"wilting // blooming"
