The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
I
have never seen a mountain like this, breaking against the sky in the middle distance. It dominates the plain as an omnipresent silhouette, made distinctive in the bright spring sun. The sky, clear and cloudless, offers no competition for the peak. Effortlessly, breathtakingly, the mountain cuts the horizon with its clarity. I have seen mountains, before. I have climbed them, even.
But never have I stood in the shadow of a mountain from miles away and watched it from the plains beneath. I feel small; insignificant, even, as True bounds thoughtlessly through the tall grass. As he breaks it, I can smell the fresh green scent and upturned earth. The feeling is nearly surreal. It takes me too long to realize this is because of the sky’s clearness, and the vast space before me. I am accustomed to islands; cramped spaces; the knowledge that if he walks far enough, I will hit the ocean. Here, it feels as if I could walk for days and never meet the water.
Something new to dream of, Chara whispers to me. The necklace rests in the hollow of my throat; it is a warm, constant heartbeat there.
I smile. But there are no witnesses, besides True. He appears to be eating something disgusting, snuffing through the grass. For that reason, I cannot count him as a witness either. Chara laughs in my mind and I laugh aloud, and continue to walk.
I might have continued to marvel at the mountain, if not distracted suddenly by the a copse of trees nearby. There are wildflowers underfoot, and in the copse of trees the sky becomes obscured by the mottled, vibrant leaves. The copse is deep enough, profound enough, I am covered in darkness. True begins to bark, hackles raised. “Quit it,” I snap; unfortunately, he has never been the most biddable companion, and my command is easily ignored.
I groan under my throat and continue walking. “Hello?” I think I catch a glimpse of motion through the leaves and boughs. “Ignore him. He has no manners.” I smile, stepping forward.
There has always been a part of me that intimately knows when something is about to die. A part of my soul that draws me like a rope to the graves of forgotten things, the ones that will make the best risen beasts. A witch-woman called it my death sense; but I call it my monster.
And always —
Always, Isolt is following death.
She chases it now, as any true-god wrapped in a unicorn's skin might, when she hears the whisper of it racing on ahead of her. Her magic comes alive with a snarl inside of her, wrapping its claws around her ribs, frothing between her lungs. And then —
it begins to pull.
One rib after the other like a wild thing pulling apart the bars of its cage. She is not settled as the whirlpool of it floods her veins. She is not content when she snarls her monster's snarl and lifts her horn like an arrow racing towards that dead-voice carried to her on the wind.
She is not a tame thing bowing to her hanger, or her rage, or her need to rend and ruin and consume. Isolt takes it all between her teeth and bites down on it.
And as she follows that whispering trail of death that calls to her, always, she is making her own trail. Flowers wilt in the heat of her gaze when she turns on them, and the heads of prairie grasses heavy with their seed-pod-crowns fall to the sharp edge of her tail blade. Watching eyes are carved from the faces of the young-birch trees that she passes. In her hoof steps rot blooms like wild flowers, dark and ravenous and choking out the life they grow upon.
And if there is a moment in which she pauses at the edge of her forest and looks out on all that space, all that grass, all those dreaming buffalo dotting the prairie like wishes — it is only to think to herself how ripe the killing field is today. And as Isolt steps out into all that openness, she is counting graves as she begins to run.
She does not linger to see the way the sleeping buffalo come awake and watch her with their prey-eyes who know the predator is running through their midst. And she does not turn from her course when the fox springs free of the grass before her and his from her shadow (but oh! Oh how she wants to.) Isolt only lopes with her killing-gait with her horn leading the way from her, leading her to the boy with death chained around his neck like a noose.
The trees of the copse begin to creak and groan when she steps between them. But it is the barking, the sound of a creature that is foolish enough to not see her right fully as god, that has her own snarl rising as warning in her throat. Her tail lashes like a whip against her legs.
"What is his name?" her voice is flat, deceptively calm despite the monster still pulling apart her ribs, begging to escape. She always did like to know the names of things before she condemned them to their graves.
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
T
he sailors always warned me to stay close to the ship. There were many islands with unseen, unknown dangers. The dangers were what I was most in love with, however; they were the very thing that drew me past the sands or rocks of the shoreline and into the mixed foliage beyond. The scene always changed, but the ethereal feeling never did.
Entering the copse, I discover the same atmosphere. It is nearly like coming home, I think—more like home than any other feeling I have felt. That is why I seek the sensation out; the intangible, indescribable emotion of standing upon a cliffside and staring down into the the unknown, or upon the brink of redwood trees so high they pierce the sky like spires. The feeling of smallness; of being a man before majesty so great it steals from him his very breath.
That is what it feels like, to see her. To meet her eyes and take in the spire of her twisted unicorn horn. That is what it feels like, to see the brightness of the scythe at the end of her leonine tail.
“True,” I snap at the same time she asks the question. The dog breaks off his barking and returns to me, but barely. He eyes her with white-eyed distrust. I clear my throat, “My apologies. His name is True.”
There is no reason for it. It was Arne who told me dogs were the truest animals in the world, and I believed her. I supposed she named him, in that capacity; and I wonder if I should be more attentive to him now and his obvious dislike of the strange unicorn.
I should. I should listen to the bristling of his hair and the twitch of his lips. I should listen to the way his body stiffens and he eyes her sidelong.
Magic, Chara whispers with an almost-laugh. She has never been afraid of anything; perhaps it is because she is already dead.
(Perhaps, however, she has been afraid of one thing: of standing on a cliffside, the sensation of smallness, of staring down).
I do not listen to True's instincts. I listen to Chara. I listen to the high, bright voice of curiosity blooming springlike and endless.
“And my name is Khier,” I say, politely. “This is truly a beautiful land. Are you native?”
The sailors, they used to warn me. If you go too far from the ship, you might never return.
Before me stands a mortal, but I do not see the life of him. I see only the death: daisy eyes and pollen-spore heart. Roots curling down his cheeks like tears and ivy vines holding the pieces of him together. I can feel his death like the wind on my cheek.
Around her she cannot stop the earth from dying.
It starts with a sigh of the grass that turns brittle and black. A dandelion sheds its seeds too soon, dropping to the ground like hail (and Isolt counts them all, all of the seeds that will never be wished upon, all of the wishes that will never come true. And she thinks the dandelion lucky, that it will not have to carry the burden of them now.) Somewhere beneath her hooves a dead sparrow is stretching its wings.
There is a part of her that mourns them.
But the rest of her — the violent, made-in-magic parts that are truly Thana’s daughter, that are coming awake with a warning snarl — the rest of her only grins a coyote grin as it lays its teeth upon the throat of the world and demands submission. The rest of her is lording over her death-circle like the young god of it.
And the young god listens for their names, because their names are the last thing she will tuck between their teeth as she lays them into their graves.
“True,” her voice is a whisper above the wind. “That is a strange name.” But she collects it all the same, carving it across the surface of her heart like another scar to carry with her, another soldier to write into her army, another secret to share with her twin.
And more grass dies. And more dandelions collapse. And more wildflowers lose their color.
“I am Isolt,” and she does not tell her what her name means, or that she is only one half of the monster that will unmake him. She only smiles a too-bright smile that is all teeth and no joy, when she says, “I am from the forest.”
But it is the whisper of magic, of something dead, the whisper she had been following from her forest that reminds her it was not mortals she was hunting after. So she steps closer, lowering her horn to his chest — no, not his chest. To the amulet that he wears on a chain, to the whisper of death and magic she can feel coming from it.
The wolves of her heart set to howling, and drooling, and scratching at her throat after it. Isolt licks her teeth, and her mouth feels so full she needs to speak around them. “And what is this?”
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
K
hier does not think to watch the world around him die; he is forever fixated on the living of it, the vibrant green of the canopy above, the steady panting of True by his side. “It is,” Khier agrees, abashedly. “I was told once there is nothing truer than a dog’s heart, and—anyways. Why name anything what it is?”
There had never been a question. True, in Khier’s life, had always been meant to be just that.
Then she says, I am Isolt and Khier smiles above the wilting dandelions, the grass grown limp, the flowers colorless. He smiles above it with eyes like gems and steps just a bit closer.
(Because this, too, smells of inevitability. Just as the breaking of the grass stalks had been when True ran through them—just as the fading of leaves in autumn. Because this, too, feels of fate and gravity and Khier has never been afraid of either).
And Khier smiles back.
He has always been a mirror.
A smile with teeth, not joy, and yet Khier possesses no dangerous edge, no suggested blade. She says she is from the forest, and he falls a little in love with her, this girl with a spiral for a horn who is from the forest.
(But that is Khier—falling a little in love with all that exists around him).
He can tell, though.
He can tell she is from it.
The same way the pagan god, carved into the tree, is from it. And the dead sparrow’s bones. The flowers, both before they wilt and after.
“Tell me something about it?” Khier asks, and she is stepping closer, removing whatever distance had remained. Her horn drops and he watches her curiously as it points to his amulet.
He supposes, however, that one must exchange a truth for a truth. He wonders if she deals in such fair measures and so, daringly, answers: “The daughter of an almost-goddess.”
You’re going to speak of me so easily? Chara asks him. Her voice should be chiding, but instead sounds impish. She is delighted to be spoken of—she always is. “From a land far from here. A jungle, grown up around the ruins of fallen heaven.”
He almost says, they grow back, of the flowers, and the grass, and the sparrows.
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 —
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?”
