The bones of this city are whispering to me. They tell me of violence, of metamorphosis, of becoming. In them I can hear the pain of being turned inside out and growing up, and up, and up.
I can feel their rage at being reduced to a thing for the mortals of this world to marvel at.
I can feel their rage at being reduced to a thing for the mortals of this world to marvel at.
T
here is a rage on this island that Isolt knows. It is the rage of things-that-have-been-made, of monsters with a hunger too great to be satisfied by the world. It is the rage of growing too fast, of feeling her bones split and her muscles tear, of spitting out a mouthful of teeth when she smiles at her sister with her bleeding gums.It is the rage of life chasing after death chasing after life.
And in it all Isolt is the wolf waiting outside the door, ready to consume everything in her path. And she prowls closer,
and closer,
and closer to the girl who looks so very small, lying there on the bones of this city.
Isolt wonders if she can feel them whispering. She wonders if she would understand the stories they have to tell, if she would feel their aches echoing between her lungs like breath. She wants to recite them to her, all of them — she wants to show her that soft things never last long between the jaws of beasts (and this world is a beast, if she does not know it yet — soon she will.)
There is a part of her which knows she should not be giving in to the violence of it, but oh! it is so much easier to slip beneath the wave of it than to try to keep her head above it. So she goes under the violence, under the hunger, under the rage of this island, and she becomes it.
“Who.” The word feels like a foreign thing hanging from her teeth, another thing waiting to be consumed by her. She has become a monster wearing the skin of a unicorn. “Who do I look like?”
Her tail keeps tapping out a heartbeat on the ground behind her, ever speeding up. The light of the island drips from the hollows of her horn like blood. Soon the distance between them is smaller and her eyes are bright enough to be rubies embedded in her skull as she looks down at the girl.
“Who are you?” Who am I? Who are we?
Who, who, who —
the word repeats itself over and over in her mind. She almost tells him that she is Isolt, that she is the daughter of Death (and soon, soon she will be Death). But with all those words that echo back to her in the bones each time her tail taps against them, she is not sure who she is anymore. All she is sure of is that she is hungry, and she is searching.
The thing inside the girl’s chest is begging to be let out. And like any good unicorn, she will carve it from her ribcage. And so she lays the flat of her blade against the skin of her chest as gently as a kiss. And she smiles that terrible monster smile when she begins to press.
from my rotting corpse flowers shall grow
