isolt.
and when our flowers are gilded in rot and weeping pollen instead of petals, I would not have it any other way.
Isolt can feel her heart making music inside of her chest, music enough for her sister to dance to. Even when they come upon that other-unicorn with the wheatgrass and sunflowers making poetry of her mirror-corpse, even then her heartbeat is a symphony only two things-that-were-made would understand the notes of. It feels right, then, that that silver unicorn should look so much like a dove watching as two snarling wolves come her way, and not understand that she was to be their meal.
It is why she smiles, all teeth and bone. And in that world where stars are skeletons of dreams and unicorns are monsters born of flesh, Isolt can smell the sunflowers and wheatgrass of summer beginning to wilt and ferment. The dying does not go gently, or quickly, or quietly. It goes one petal at a time, sloughing off like dandelion wishes in the wind (only these ones carry dreams of mortality in every drop of their decay, instead of wishes.) There is no grass to wither and die at her hooves here, but oh, even the death of the reflection fills her up and sits like a weight at the bottom of her hunger.
There is a part of her that thinks the scene playing out in the mirror is a revelation. And the magic in her blood is whispering to her of a thousand ways she could recreate the death of innocence here in this world, of how she could carve art from this other-unicorn’s body the way she carved the dead-star.
Maybe it is a good thing, then, that their horns should press together not a moment too soon, before Isolt has a chance to drive the point of bone through flesh and learn how deep her hunger truly goes. Before she has a chance to tell her no, that the difference between the living and the dead lay in the killing, or to whisper the ways she could show her.
Instead there is only the feel of bone against bone, midnight skies on fermented wine (or is it the other way around?), the impermanence of life on immortality. Every bit of her magic comes awake at the feel of it, burning like all those dead-stars come back to life inside of her veins. And there is a moment when Isolt presses back into her touch that it seems as though all the violent promises of winter are about to be fulfilled.
She steps back, and hides the way her skin is trembling by pressing it into her sister’s. “If you need to ask,” she says around the aching of her teeth, “then you will never know.” And when she shivers, it has nothing to do with the cold of winter —
and everything to do with hunger.
Her blade is still drawing music along the star skeleton ground as she turns and drapes her own throat across her sister who still dances even when they are both standing still. And as that question why — hangs in the air between them like a noose, she holds her breath and begins to count.
Isolt holds her breath like the waiting matters — and as her heart begins to race like it’s lost the pace of her sister’s and is trying desperately to catch it again.
i wonder what i look like
in your eyes
