I S O L T
—
A home for rot, for death, for me.
T
here is a way about death that has always felt like coming home. She can feel it now beneath the blade of her tail, the way her rot leeches into the tree-veins in place of sap and makes the bark slough off like diseased skin around her touch. If it were not for the mortal standing there with his too-blue eyes (looking at the tree, not at her — looking at the tree the way her father looks at trees), there would have been nothing stopping her from carving line, after line, after line into the old god’s bark.If she stood there long enough, if she made enough scars into its skin — Isolt knows she could bring the whole thing crashing down.
She wonders what it would make of her, to kill a god. She wonders if the mortals of this world would bow down to her like the new-god, the true-god, the killer of all other gods. She wonders if they would stop looking at her with their hooded gazes, if they would instead offer themselves to her like an all too willing sacrifice (instead of running from the slaughter her gaze has always promised.)
She wonders if it would only make them run all the faster from her.
Sometimes she is jealous, when she looks at all the fragile and mortal things of this world that can look at a tree and see its beauty where she sees only the death of them. And sometimes she hates the way she can not love the same softness that they do, that always (always) her horn is carving away every thread of it before she has a chance to dull the rage that blooms in her chest instead of roses. And she hates — oh, how she hates! — the way it makes them all look at her, like a thing incapable of love, or gentleness, or kindness; a monster-who-should-not-exist.
They are right, of course, about all of those things. But still she hates the way they look at her because of it. Still seeing the way they shy from her when she walks amongst them feel both like a god and a leper, like it is both her birth-right and her curse.
She is expecting him to look at her the same way, when finally he lowers his blue eyes from the tree to the monster cutting lines into its skin.
But he does not.
And Isolt cannot decide if she misses the look or not.
So she pulls the blade of her tail from the bark of the tree, and offers it to him instead. It curls like the dark sickle of the moon between them. “Would you like to find out?” she whispers to him like a promise. And her smile looks too-much like the dark scythe, waiting to swing.
She does not step closer (but oh, she thinks she wants to) to this boy with his distant eyes. She only waits — and a part of her begins to wish.
rotting and rooting
wilting and blooming
@Ceylon
