the beauty of winter captures my soul
If my sister were here, she would be growing flowers from the bones of this ribcage-bridge. She would make it a garden of death, and color, and beauty, and we would dance together in it.
But she is not here. And I am staring at these bones, and I am trying, I am trying so hard — and nothing comes. Nothing answers me. Only a speck of rot creeps further up the curve of the rib, and it cracks beneath the weight of it.
But she is not here. And I am staring at these bones, and I am trying, I am trying so hard — and nothing comes. Nothing answers me. Only a speck of rot creeps further up the curve of the rib, and it cracks beneath the weight of it.
S
omewhere, she knows, her twin is carving out her agony from a god’s vein. And her mother-monster is rediscovering her violence, while her father tries to forget his, and all of them are following the god-blood rivers running to the same point. But she is not.
She is climbing, running up when all the rivers are running down, and she does not think to look at that point where they all converge somewhere at the bottom. She does not think to find her family waiting there for her. She does not think of anything at all.
She is only feeling the way the bones beneath her hooves are calling out to the bones beneath her skin (or is it the other way around?), the way each step echoes in the dark pit of her belly. And she is feeling the wind-that-does-not-blow sit stale and stagnant against her cheek like a kiss, the weight of all that dead-air pressing in against her as she climbs. And every time the walls pulse and weep more of that silver blood-water, she feels her own heart leaping to beat in time with it.
Isolt does not know how she finds the courtyard with the carved-bone flowers. She thinks maybe they had called her here, or that maybe the island had listened to the hungry cry of her magic and made this place for her and for her alone. Or maybe she had been following the pegasus marked like the forest here — because when she crosses the threshold and listens to her tail blade tap, tap, tapping out a song on the bone floors, she is there, waiting.
And everything in her, every bit of her hunger from before that had begged her to carve that leaf from her brow and hang it from the winter-bare branches, all of it starts to gnash its teeth at the sight of her standing there.
For a long, trembling moment, she says nothing. She does nothing. She stands at the corner of the fountain and waits to feel seen, but by the girl or by the flowers she is not sure. Long seconds tick by, and her tail aches to count them out along the curved throat of the fountain, but she doesn’t.
It is not until Nicnevin meets her gaze, red to bloody red, that she steps forward. Her blade scratches a line down the side of the fountain.
“Oh,” she breathes, when she steps forward to take the place the other girl had abandoned. “They are beautiful.” She traces the petals with her horn, and this time — this time! — she does not see the black specks of disease creeping along their edges.
It settles something in her bones that she had not realized was aching.
