from my rotting corpse
I feel like a leaf in autumn, ready to rot, ready to fall, fall, fall from the branch like it is anything but death I am leaping into. The world feels like a thing that has only ever been waiting for me, as the flowers wilt and my sides and the grass curls beneath my hooves. And when the wind begins to howl, I know it is asking for me, calling for me, naming me like winter.
I am —
I am —
She is a monster to the rest of the world. She is the shadow stalking between the trees, the disease riddling their trunks until they are pock-marked and weak. Her blade is the last thing dying creatures see flashing before their eyes and then — blessed darkness.
And the quiet.
And nothingness tucked around them like a blanket to comfort them in their graves. It was the closest thing to peace she would ever be able to offer them.
As she looks now at the strange man with carvings she does not understand curled around his horns, she wonders if he would prefer clover or poppies pressed against his eyes when she laid him in the ground. She wonders if he would still smile so easily at her, and still step so willingly forward, if he knew the way she was counting ribs beneath his skin each time he breathed in. If he would still be so quick to tell her his secrets if he knew his secrets were the only reason he still had lungs to breathe with, and a heart to beat with, and teeth to smile with.
He steps forward, and she wonders how he does not see the monster just below her skin that is waiting to consume him.
Isolt blinks so slowly it is like watching ice melt in the winter sun, like witnessing a once-dead thing relearn how to breathe. She blinks, and she imagines she can see the dead-girl trapped there in the necklace, a caged thing that still dreams of the freedom it lost.
She wants to bleed it from him. She wants to carve the symbols on his horns deeper, and deeper, until they are red instead of gold, until flowers are rising from each drop of blood like it is soil instead of a soul. Isolt feels the sparrows in her lungs start to stir, and beat their dust-and-spore wings against her ribs like she is the locket and they are the trapped things inside of her.
But if that were the case, Isolt would stop at nothing to peel back her ribs and set them free, set all of them free, until the world was overrun with her risen things.
“My forest?” the question hangs between them like it is speared on the tip of her horn. For a moment she lets it flutter there, soft and broken, because it is not in her nature to give, or exchange truths for truths (only take, and take, and consume.)
Somewhere a hawk is diving after a field mouse, and Isolt can feel the terror of the thing in the moment before the world goes black; she breathes in the death of it, watches over his shoulder as the hawk carries its prize away. And then she turns her gaze away and shifts it (still heavy with sorrow and hunger) to the boy as he waits. “It is as much alive as it is dead, and beneath its roots lie a thousand forgotten things.” Forgotten to all but her and her twin, when each night they go and beg a little more of that secret world to come awake for them.
Her eyes turn sharp then, the forest forgotten when he offers a truth in exchange. Again her horn points at it, only this time — oh this time she steps forward, creeping again and again like rot along a leaf, until she can tap the tip of her horn against the metal face of it.
She taps. And she listens.
As if she can hear the voice of the dead-girl crying out to her (and oh, Isolt imagines she can hear her begging for freedom.)
Her heart feels like a caught thing in her own chest, a rabbit frozen with its foot in the snare. And when she speaks again her voice is a whisper, a choked thing: “What almost-goddess would let her daughter be trapped in such a thing?”
She knows Thana never would.
@khier
"wilting // blooming"
