She does not know, but oh, I only know one way to show her.
L
eading the child deeper and deeper into the waiting forest makes her feel even more like a reaper hurrying the dying along. And if there has ever been flowers in her heart instead of rot she does not feel them now, not when every drop of her magic is rising to meet her searching gaze, and everything in her is whispering There. Just below the jaw. Strike there. She steps closer, close enough to count the ribs beneath her skin, the vertebrae lining her back. And again she feels the death-song tremor of her heart, the whisper of her rage hollowing itself out into a scream.
All around them the trees are turning into twisted things with claws for branches, reaching out to scrape along their sides as they pass. Isolt can feel the hunger in them, can nearly hear them screaming out. Their roots tremble beneath her hooves and she only rakes the blade of her tail through the dirt and promises them, Soon. She taps her horn against the frozen trunk of a birch and watches rot creep from its unblinking eye. Soon you will have all the blood you could ever drink. And she can almost imagine the slash she carves beneath its eye a smile.
She wonders how Elliana does not see it. How she walks on, and on, and on and never sees the forest that is opening like a wound around her, or the unicorns that smile with hunger instead of joy. How she looks at dead things and thinks of them as friends.
”Stop.”
Her jaw grinds around the word. She wants to reach out and carve it into the girl’s skin, to pull the innocence from her heart with her teeth until she learns to shiver at the touch of death instead of rejoice.
Her eyes are whispering all those bloody promises and more when she steps past and points at the frozen ground with her horn. And every crow, and wolf, and hyena, and bear roaring in her chest falls silent when she sweeps the flat of her blade across the earth and reveals an open grave sank into the earth. Isolt does not have to wonder which of the ghosts clawed its way free of it.
She smiles, and presses the child closer with the tip of her horn against her side. “This one is for you.” Fallen leaves and pine needles create a bed of rot at the bottom of it. And the roots crawling up its sides look to her only like open arms waiting to welcome their child of shadows who does not know any better, home, home, home.
But not yet.
“And when you are ready for it, we will come and find you.” She whispers against her with her teeth against the child’s skin, and presses hard enough that she might feel the warning racing like lightning through her veins.
isolt
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