ISOLT
All dreams end, and all things wake eventually.
Beneath her tail a crack blooms across the painted wall. It spreads like a wildflower reaching for the sky, stretching out its stalk further, further — splitting into leaves, and petals, and more stalks upon which more flowers bud.
Isolt watches it spread, feeling caught between the lines of it as it splits the story in two. On one side a hunt, endless, perpetual; life that is running, and running, and running because to stop is to starve. And on the other side, a death that repeats itself over and over again, as if each warrior to toss their spear at the great beast’s eye is foolish enough to think their ending will be different than all the others that came before.
It will not be different. The girl is right — it’s an old story, one she knows the answer to already.
But knowing its end does not make the rest of it any less exciting.
It feels like a terrible thing, a mortal thing, to care any less of the bones buried somewhere here in these caverns. And she is thinking of the bramblebear again — for he, too, was an old story the castlekeeper had whispered to them, and still she and her twin had written him a new ending that night in the woods — and the way his hunger had felt great enough to consume an army sent after him but still (but still!) had bowed to her’s.
Death may be an old story. But it was not the end of the story, not when she was there to add pages upon pages of risen things blinking the sleep from their daisy-eyes.
“Maybe there is another story you would like to hear,” she rolls an eye back to look at the girl when all the flickering stops and the flame stands tall and still upon its torch. The magic makes her heart beat a little bit faster as if it is both in love with and in defiance of it. Somewhere buried in the loam of her an owl is pecking at her liver, and a wood mouse is burying down in her stomach, and a sparrow is beating its rot-and-spore wings against her lungs.
She blinks them back. “There is a story that comes after this one,” and again her blade scrapes against the paintings smeared across the wall.
@aster !
"wilting // blooming"
"wilting // blooming"
