Closer, closer, closer — with every step I feel more like a monster. With every step I slip deeper into a thing I have always known to be lying coiled in the pit of my belly. With every tap of the blade of my tail it is another note to the song I cannot take back, to the spiral I cannot pull myself out of.
So I do not try to resist. I do not try to take it back, or to be anything but that which I was made to be:
So I do not try to resist. I do not try to take it back, or to be anything but that which I was made to be:
A
monster.Isolt is becoming a monster, and she does not have the remorse to pull herself back from it.
If her sister were here, she might; if she felt anything but the endless pit of sorrow and rage and the confusion of too many things, too much magic knitted into a too young body — if she was born instead of half-made, she might have pulled herself back. She might have thought to become anything but the beast that smiles down at a frightened girl and promises to consume her.
But she does not. She only relishes in the feel of the girl’s pulse against the blade of her tail, and marks with her eyes the spot where the artery of her throat lies. There, she whispers to her magic turning feral in her veins, there is where I will unmake her.
There are no vines here to pull through her body when she is dead, no seeds to root in her eyes and grow daisies of them. Isolt is not her sister.
And without her, this girl will not become a risen thing. She will stay here in the belly of an island like a sacrifice from one god to another.
A sacrifice she will never get the chance to make.
The fire bites into her flesh, her eyes with a pain she has not known before. A snarl rushes to her teeth when she leaps back, her blade slashing blindly through the air before her. Her voice becomes the roar of a monster howling out its fury to the world as the embers sting her eyes.
With tears streaming down her face from her burning eyes, she swings her head from side to side looking for the girl. And through her blurred and doubled vision, on legs that ache, she begins to stalk through the markets looking for her.
And the blade of her tail brings every stall crashing down before her as she hunts, and hunts, and hunts in the only way monsters know how: unrelentingly.
from my rotting corpse flowers shall grow
