do i still taste of war. can you feel the battles on my skin stitched across my back
Tonight, the scent of the desert bathes Arawn's skin. Tonight, he is far from the cities of Delumine, far from their taiga forests. Arawn roams the desert with his fiendish lips curled into a scythe-smile. A hunger stirs within him, a need—a want. His soul purrs with desire. The damning heat bathes his flesh in grime, blood and sweat—his lean physique ripples with smooth, male muscles as Arawn crosses the desert in a lupine swagger. A wolf's shadow cut rough along the banking dunes; the dying sunlight sliding whiskey-hot against his spine—
He drinks in the desert ambience while his hounds trail his wake. His hounds bristle like a black tide against his feet. They dance and whimper with a hunger, too. Their savage howling sings along a gilded zephyr, as coyotes yip in the distance and run in fear. But tonight they are not hunting, they are not running animals into the earth in a sea of blood, so the coyotes are left to flee. In the parched, Solterran desert, the oasis stirs in nocturne life. In its last breath, the sun weeps crimson tears against Arawn's masculine flesh.
It's last lumen rays flew upon an overture of a hot, dry breeze—coiling and tumbling like amber serpents against his disheveled mane. When he nears the body of water, the oasis, he dives in. The blood on skin is washed away—if only he could wash away his sins, too. Blood swarms against the gilded surface of crystal-blue water. It tinges the pool, red. When he surfaces, when he emerges dripping wet from the water, he steps unto the sand and inhales deeply the night air.
Now, it is moonlight that descends his flesh and not sunlight. Now, it is a silver gleam that kisses his skin in carnal whispers. And when his eyes ensnare an approaching figure, Arawn greets the stranger with a smiling flash of teeth—
I have always wondered what it is about the desert that holds my father’s heart in its fist. Why he should love it so when it refuses to speak to him, to sing for him, to grow the flowers which the forest gives him so readily.
I asked him once, if it was hate instead of love that drew him here, that maybe he did not know the difference between the two.
He had only looked at me, in his quiet way, and told me to go and see it for myself.
S
o it is that Isolt comes to the desert with her father’s words echoing in her mind. So it is that she is searching for that nameless thing he has found here, the thing that has wrapped itself like a rope around his heart that she is determined to cut. The blade of her tail carves lines into the sand in her wake, a whisper of violence carving the night apart.
It fills and it breaks the silence.
And if the dunes were singing (as her father liked to say they did), they fall silent now when she walks among them.
There is a part of her that will forever understand the violence that echoes in every grain of sand in a way only a unicorn made would know. The wind howling across the dunes is singing the law of the desert to her in all the bright and hungry notes of death. It is screaming as it whistles down the curl of her blade and it makes some part of her, some festering pool of rot barely contained in her chest, break itself open and spill out upon the sand.
She leaves trails of it as she walks, specks of mold and ash filling the scars her tail blade cuts into the sand. And in every shadow of sand and sliver of moonlight arcing across the desert, she is searching for something for her rot to consume, searching for that thing her father loves so much.
Isolt is still searching when she finds the trail of another, of life running parallel to her death. And like the true-death, the true-god that she is, she chases after it.
And she wonders all the way to the Oasis if this is what Ipomoea loves about Solterra.
This thrill of the hunt, this thrill of the violence of the sand calling put to the violence etched into her bones. This, oh this she understands, when she stops at the bank of the pool and lets the water kiss her hooves (like a sinner crawling to the feet of its priest.) That understanding roars in her chest when she watches the man lift his head above the water like another god of the desert. The moonlight turns the water streaming down his face to quicksilver, to god-blood, to the oils of his anointing.
She waits until he comes closer to speak. “Why did you wash the blood away.” Her voice does not lilt the way a question should. It only runs straight as a spear racing for the man’s throat, quieter than the whisper of her tail still carving lines in the sand. And were it not for the glow of her bloody eyes in the moonlight, like wolves waiting in the darkness, he might have seen the second question that lingers below the first.
The wanting of her hungry heart that asks why would you want to forget?
A being more made than born, always feels hunger, always feels dissatisfaction, always feels dangerous. Arawn feels both dead and alive, for the sensuous way, water drips like mercurial silver down his toned muscles—for the carnal way the moon races like fingertips, caressing down his spine. The bloodied water kisses his flesh like a forbidden lover. It wraps him in a veil of translucent hue.
It drips, and drips, into the hollow spaces of his neck and chest muscles—it pools by his hooves, as sweat slides along his flesh, risen along the scarred memories of him left by the remnants of war and bloodshed. Arawn lives in those dead memories of hatred and vengeance. Each scar is both poem and threat. His wrath, both aches and purrs, as a lion drawn to violence stretched too tightly and snarling to tear underneath his skin.
He is drawn to her in turn. To the white roses that dapple her slender neck, her shoulders and perfect, crimson complexion. To the blood-red diamonds of her gaze, that echo with that same murderous hunger of death and wanting. She reminds him of someone he knows. Someone whose name he keeps for the shadows of their intimate kiss and desired prayer. She reminds him of roses so red, she could drown the whole world in blood and gore. She reminds him of unicorns with death as lovers.
But this water, this moonlight, this fleeting, desert dream—it is false reprieve; for his skin is soon dry, soon cracked, aggravated by the sweltering, desert heat that eats at him like decay eats spoiled wood. His old wounds, coil like withered serpents upon his flesh. His bones ache with thirst, and life. His skin is crawling with a fever. Demons have carved their sins into his eyes. They seethe as winter seethes, from the steely weight of his near-white pupils. For endless is his want, his devotion. His desire.
The hunger Arawn feels is eternal—it pools like cancerous, black sludge between his lungs—it dives as a monster in the tides of his blood, cooing between the ruinous landscape of his ribcage. Eating, tearing, winding into the marrow of his soul, till it howled and retched in violent retribution. Arawn is without satisfaction. Without happiness. Without joy. Without pleasure—his soul is as dry as the desert, his mouth as parched as brittle soil, and his heart an empty graveyard.
And the hunger he always feels, consumes him. Even now, with silver moonlight splaying like a devil across his back, the emptiness splits his heart wide until arterial veins look more like teeth and eyes, than they do blood and white. Between the flickering scythe-moon of the wild, solterran desert he is here now to sate his want, his eternal longing. But his heart is a beast blind, consumed by wrath and rage—and when he fully turns his frigid gaze to the maiden dressed in vermillion, he does not blink nor smile. But his teeth is sharp, when it tugs like winter pulls for the coffin-black edges of her Death.
"I sleep better at night without the memory of their screams," His voice is dark, and rough, it curls from his mouth like the promise a serpent makes. "Without the scent of their blood on my skin," His stare is piercing when he steps alongside her and tosses his skull like a lion bellows into the night for the promise of the hunt. Bloodied water drips down his chin and curls against his fanged-lips. He watches the way the blackened ash billows at her heels, the way her blade slices knife-like through pillows of soft, gold sand. She is not the moon he knows, but a maiden darker, bloodier, dripping full of decadence. Unearthly, with hell bowing like glory, or torture,before her feet."Why are you awake?"
@Isolt
do i still taste of war. can you feel the battles on my skin stitched across my back. am i still rebuilding bone by fragile bone
Oh, there is hunger in him. I can feel it there beneath the surface, there in the red of his skin, of the sharpness of his horn, of the bright-white flash of his teeth. It should be a warning sign, it should mean something to me —
but it only makes that pit of magic and anger and sorrow all wrapped together in knots inside of me, begin to purr. And growl. And lay their teeth against my ribs.
S
he stands there with the water lapping at her ankles and a man and his hounds emerging from the water, and all she thinks is how the world might look when she and her sister at last consume the moon and the sun.
Her made-in-magic heart trembles to see the reflection of it cast on the water behind him. Of that eye-in-the-sky that is watching her, always watching her. Like a god watching the titan, like a war that is brimming.
And Isolt —
Isolt is the wolf who will consume the world in the war that is to come.
So she smiles at that moon, she smiles with every one of her too-bright and too-sharp and too-hungry teeth. And when she turns to the man the smile lives on in the brightness of her eyes.
His horn is moonlight when he raises it in the greeting that all unicorns recognize. And Isolt wants to pull every quicksilver thread from it, to let it run down her brow like moon-kissed water. She wants to watch it drip, and drip, and drip, and spoil as it touches her skin. She wants to see it turn from white to black, from life to rot, to death, to a plague that she will feed back to him.
She wants to consume him — she wants to consume everything. His hounds, the water that clings to his skin, the entire desert her father loves so much. She wants to tear it all down to its bones to give them as a gift to Danaë.
That magic in her blood whispers yes, yes, yes to her heart with every beat. And it begins to feel as though she is holding back a tide when she lets the water kiss her feet like sinners kissing the feet of their priest.
She does not step any farther into the water. She will not let it wash away the memories of the stag, or the meadow hare, or the elk, or the girl from the island — she will not let it take their blood that is still dried in flakes on her horn. That is her’s, and her’s alone to keep. That is her reminder of her risen things, her bright, dead things that come to her each night and run freely on root-and-bone legs.
But she does not tell him any of that. He would not understand that the dead do not scream to her — they cry out to her. They whisper their hopes, their dreams, their memories of living, their hunger. They beg her for hearts to beat with and legs to run on, and she — blessed, merciful god that she is — grants them their wishes.
Instead she only lifts her bright gaze to his, and asks him: ”Who?” Whose screams does he hear? Whose blood does he wear? Whose life did he take? And where? And why? And how can she find them again to grow daisies in their unseeing eyes?
Isolt steps closer to him, and her tail makes a hushing sound in the sand behind her. She steps close enough that she might count the tracks of water running off of his skin like the tears of gods.
“At night, all dead things are awake.” She aches to drag the words across his skin with her teeth. ”Including me.”
