some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
Today the air drifts in from the mountains. It pulls snow from the white caps with it and the flakes swirl down, light as dandelion seeds, to melt onto the verdant plane below. The wind carries, not just snow, but a boy too. He sweeps in, agile as a bird and light as a deer. The wild curls of his mane tangle ever more in the breeze, twining tighter around twigs and leaves.
The boy follows the swirling down draughts and dips to the open meadow. The mountains from which he came grow lilac in the background. They dominate the sky behind Leonidas and he lands like a phoenix - all warm golds and fiery copper.
Babbling water follows the meandering path of the creek. Leonidas wastes no time stepping into the water. He wades out, knowing the place he stops, where the water is strangely deeper and the trees rise taller beside the widening stream.
The water leaves him, carrying with it dust and dirt and all the kinds of things that wild-wood boys find pressed into their skin at the end of the day. He bathes. And at one blink he is a boy and at the next a forest king with his brace of antlers a gleaming crown atop his head. The vines, the wild flowers and the tangling leaves are all earthen jewels and decorations to his crown. The boy is nearly a man and the two combine as a gleam shimmers in his eye as he stills… still as a stag. A solitary ear twists toward the bank. His moment of quiet, rapt attention is gone as he continues bathing, water sluicing from his wings that dip below the water. Unwise, he thinks, briefly, when his end has come to watch him from atop the bank.
His head turns at last, aquiline eyes, gold as the sun, catching her like talons. “You are too early, Little Death. I think you will only be disappointed by me.”
I can see it, when I go to sleep. That other-world with those other-people, the dead-people, turning over in their shallow graves. Each night I hear them calling for me. And each night I go to them.
And one by one I am cracking their caskets open.
S he has dreamed of his death. When she lies down to sleep beneath a full moon, like an unblinking eye in the night sky, and all the wolves in the distance are lifting their noses as one to howl at it. On those nights the feel of her sister's ribscage pressed tightly to her own is the one thing (the only thing) that is able to stop her from lifting her horn to pluck that eye from the face of the world. But not even the shush, shush, shush of her heart can keep the dreams away.
Last night had been no different.
She had run through the dark dreamscape of her nightmares with a monster made of flesh and roots at her side. And together they had chased the moon, with their lavender ribs grown threaded together and their daisy eyes weeping petals instead of tears. Around and around and around the world, jaws opening wide with every step that brought them closer to their prey. Until at last with one final leap —
Isolt woke up. And instead of the moon staring down at her in her wilted flower bed, it was the sun. As though daring her to chase it, too.
Danaë had asked her what she dreamt about, tangled up legs and horns with her. And her answer had been the same as it had been the morning before, and the one before that: "The end of the world."
So now she is chasing the sun, as she follows the wild Rapax into gentler territory. She is watching the reflection of it dance around her legs when she steps into the water. Around her hooves reeds and pond weeds turn to algae that blooms in flower-patterns, choking the river with the sludge of it all. With each step and she turns more of the river to a dead thing strangling the life from itself. And when the dust and dirt from another is carried downstream to her, she presses into it all like a wolf coming home. And still she is following the sun.
She can see it now in his antlers that drip water and sunlight when he lifts his head, in the light that halos between them and turns the empty air into a broken thing full of colors. She can see it in his eyes when he turns to her, twin suns staring back at her, daring her.
Isolt smiles.
“Am I too early?” her voice is a whisper of water sliding across to him. She steps deeper into the water, so it creeps further and further up her body. The algae and rotting, floating plants turn the water dark and thick. “It’s not so bad, being dead. I could show you.”
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
Am I too early?
That is what his death asks as she steps down into the water with her apocalypse dreams sprouting like weeds between her pale ribs.
Am i too early?
That is how his death counters him as she pads, neat and keen as a lion across the shallow creek. Isolt’s eyes glow with excitement at the seduction of death as all around her the river bed turns over and reaches its end. Expired creatures and shrivelled plants rise to the surface and bend their backs, their ribs, their stems as they float, still and rotten all around her.
Leonidas feels death pressing her kisses to his limbs as corpses rise around him. Isolt turns the stream to death and as the current carries them away, he sees the petals and eyes that watch him with unlinking accusation from their limp bodies.
They tell him it is his time. He should be the one Isolt sends floating down the creek, his body to catch in its slim throat like a dam that floods the plane.
The water runs black and it washes its dank dirt back upon the boy and his so-recently-clean skin. He will wear the smell of her death for days to come - another reminder of her, of their fatefully entwined lives.
Leonidas merely smiles at her, his lioness, come to reap the harvest of the gazelle she has stalked since their first meeting. Little does the forest boy know that his mother’s mother was a gazelle. Neither does he know that she fled a lion-unicorn until they learned to lie together, hunter and hunted. Maybe that is why he turns toward his death now and watches her like the Novus’ sun god might watch the looming of night.
She will extinguish all the gold of him. Leonidas knows it. Already he feels the way she tarnishes him, the way her eyes are a scouring wind, stripping the surface soil of his body away, exposing the rocks and roots of his bones and muscles.
“Is it not?” He whispers as she nears and marvels how her proximity feels like teeth. To be near her is the pain and cold and sweet numbing oblivion of impending death. The boy gets drunk upon the inevitability of this girl. His eyelids hang heavy and intoxicated over his burnished eyes.
“Show me then.”
Already he has begun to look at the death that floats morosely at her feet. Leonidas feels his wings begin to wilt.
Perhaps it should worry me, that I am become a monster. Perhaps it should scare me that there is only one thing is this world (one thing) that can stop me from destroying this entire land and myself in the process. Perhaps I should try harder to not be this thing, this wolf who cannot pick up its jaw from the path of destruction laid before it.
But oh! the look in their eyes when I come closer -- when their death comes closer -- will never let me stop.
The willows growing along the banks begin to bend, their spines twisting like priests bowing their heads to their god of death. She can feel them leaning in around her — can feel their branches, leaves sloughing off like diseased skin, trailing along her back. They wilt until the river is full of their tears, until it seems as though at any moment they might collapse into the river in the only sort of baptism Isolt understands.
She does not know how to make it stop. If her sister were here she might have, all of her magic focused on one single oak by which she might lay waste to if only for the joy of seeing her sister’s wisteria grow from its corpse (with blooms brighter and more beautiful than any her father might hope to grow.) She might have dragged herself from the river so that the sight of it carrying all her rot away wouldn’t kindle that rage that begs her, always begs her, to replace the stolen with more, and more, and more.
She might have recognized the warning signs in her bones as her own disease, waiting to consume her as quickly as it consumes the pondgrass tangled around her legs.
But Isolt is thinking of none of this when she tilts her head at the pegasus (her pegasus, as she would come to know him as, her wild thing who she would one day shackle.) She is thinking only of the risen fish with algae scales that bumps itself against her fetlock and weaves between her steps. There is only one — as if even the river, as if even her magic is trying to remind her that she is only one of twins.
The river laps at her belly, painting her sides with algae and rotten petals. It feels to her as if she can feel the rot inside of her trembling, pressing itself against her ribs, reaching through to link hands with the rot of the river.
So she takes another step closer. And she makes no effort to swallow back down the plague that wants to bleed through her lips like tar over the world.
“Do you not see already?” the fish takes a lily stem between its teeth and threads it around the boys front legs, bumping its skeletal body against his. “He is free. All of them are free. Free from the pain of life, of loss, of love —“ her horn aches to lay itself against his skin like a prayer, but she whispers to it still not yet, not yet, not yet.
Instead she lifts her muzzle to his antlers — the way they’ve dulled the way the sun does as it sinks lower, like gold that has tarnished. But it has not tarnished enough for her, not until her sister’s flowers blooming from the spine of them are the brightest part. So she skims her lips down the smooth curl of one tine, and waits to see what rot blooms in her wake.
"What do you ail from, Leonidas? I could take it all away.”
And in her eyes is a whisper of a promise, blood red dangerously close to his gold.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
Yes. She is right. He does feel lonely. Leonidas is a cherished garden abandoned to grow forgotten and wild. Where plants and flowers of memories were placed and lovingly sculpted, now they are choked by the weeds of forgetting. Leonidas has turned from a son into an orphan and he is so utterly lonely.
Aspara has taught him touch and friendship and he yearns for it like the choked flowers of his forgotten garden. Isolt moves close and the fae-boy is so starved of touch, of proximity that he lets his death press in upon him. Better, he begins to think, to let death touch him, for it might be the only thing that cares enough to search him out.
Her lips touch his tines and though he craves touch, though he needs it, he is glad she has not touched him anywhere else. Still he is a flighty boy, in need of love and desperately fearful of it too.
As his eyes roll closed with her death-touch he looks like a man remembering he is still a boy. He feels so far from adulthood, from the effects of age which silently work upon him, sculpting him from a sapling boy into a rough oak, tall and rooted and strong.
But even trees fall sick and her touch is a sickness that feasts upon his sorrow. She whispers her words and they fill his ears like incantations. He succumbs to the magic of her tempting death. He yields to her, tilting his head, his tines to her lips. Though the path of them leaves tarnished gold in its wake. Their gold is turning to brown and crumbling away like dust. The girl erases him with her touch and all the while the awoken fish swims in circles.
Leonidas can feel her at his ribs. He feels her in his blood turning it black and thick like tar. His heart turns sluggish and his skin turns dark with his magic and hers. Leonidas; the sun boy, the autumn child of gold and bronze and brown, wilts, for she comes at him like winter and demands he die in her arms.
The fish swims, skeletal, starved of life as he is starved of love and bloated on loss. Already he feels like a corpse, blooming with rot and stained with algae. He can feel his teeth turning and knows if her twin was here his teeth would be blooming with fat flowers weaving his death-teeth together. With clarity, Leonidas knows then that upon his death he will be found like a dead-forest walking; with twigs for ribs, vines for hair, dank streams for black blood and rotting flowers weaving all the parts of him together.
“Yes.” He says; a dying man. “I am all those things.” And he looks into her blood-eyes as they press so close to the gold of his.
Somewhere within him something is waking. Something depthless, timeless, it is his immortality, pressed in his being with time magic. It rouses and rises through the spell of her death magic. It spills up through the choking loneliness that drowns the boy in this creek of rot and loss. It turns his head to his pretty girl of death and spills time magic out like ichor between his lips. It spills bright and gold upon the surface of the lake and turns it blue with new growth, new, fast growing life.
I can see him slipping away. His antlers collapsing to dust at the tines, but it is more than that — it is something in his soul. Something between his heartbeats. There is a part of him that is missing.
If I were a kinder god, I would try to fill that gap between his ribs. But I am not made to be kind. That gap is where I will place my horn, and that missing piece of him is the very thing by which I will unmake him. His sorrow is the thing I will fill my belly with.
Isolt is consuming his stuttering heartbeat.
That is what it feels like, when she feels her’s begin to speed up at the same time his begins to slow. The taste of him is like honey beneath her lips, even when the dust of his antlers coats her tongue and speckles her jaw.
This death — his death — is not the same as that of the elks, or mountain lions, or does she had hunted. His death is sweeter, something meant to be savored, something meant to be sacred in the only way that Isolt knows to make something holy. Oh, her tail aches to carve a line across his throat, her horn hungers for the feel of his ribs pressing on either side of it and his heart gasping on the end of it. But his death is not something she wants to rush.
His death means more than that, to her.
Already she is imagining what he will look like with daisy-eyes and wisteria blooming from his cuts. When she looks at him she can see her sister’s growth holding the pieces of him together, flowers filling all the places where his sorrows and pains were once held. She can hear the creaking of his vine-and-root joints as he runs through the forest with them as a risen thing held up by their shoulders pressed to either side of his.
It is so close — she can see it between his heartbeats. Between his lungs. Between his breaths.
And she is there as he wilts, ready to catch him when he falls at last, ready to tuck his sorrow between his teeth like clover, like one last thing to take to the grave.
She is stepping forward, her horn lowering, when the magic comes suddenly awake. Isolt springs back as though burned. And when she looks down and sees the new growth of the river, the growth that grows as fast as her rot, that grows faster —
the smile on her lips turns to a snarl. The life of a dead thing was for her sister, and for her alone. Not some woodland boy who has already vowed to give her his death.
“Tell me which of us is the liar,” she hisses. The life that grows around him is pressing in against her legs, pressing her backwards, pressing her away. The risen fish grows fangs, pulls its lily-stalk-rope tighter around his legs. “I could give you more than life.”
But the red of her eyes is promising only violence now.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
He does not see how his magic is changing things around them. How she flinches as if burned. When he does see, when her retreating awakens him from the stupor Isolt has lulled him into, then he sees how his Death is pushed back, back, back.
The wildling watches her go. There is no smile of victory in him, his eyes are sombre and still, resting always on her like the sun ceaselessly bathing her skin. Upon his lips is a wish to call her back. The words are already forming themselves upon his tongue. But there too is knowing. Knowing that this is the way of things, of… them.
Isolt is his cat, laying her claws into the weakest parts of him. But his magic contains the wilieness of a fox, the bravery of a stag. It whispers along her magic and says no. The fae-youth feels it in the way his bones sing with her magic and his.
Even as he watches his magic repel her, he thinks too of how it also longs to work with her. To bring her magic racing faster, faster. His magic is not that of simply death, but life. All existence yields to time and time is his. He remembers a sister, as pallid as Isolt’s. If she were here, his sister of feral magics, he knows with effort and time they together could freeze Isolt’s magic as it works. They could freeze Isolt herself, if they chose. The boy sighs softly. It would be a tragedy though, to clip the wings of another so… This is the truth of Leonidas. He enjoys the danger of this girl and her sister. In the way he loves the wilder looks of a wolf as it years to make a feast of him. It is needed in the wild wood. It is needed to bring death as a counterbalance to life. He looks to her and Time whispers along his skin as it ripples through the water.
“No.” He says to her as she is pushed back by weeds, full of vitality. “You misunderstand me.” Now he moves to her, through the tangling growth that trips even him. Now he is the one pursuing her and he does not think this will be the last time. They are bound now, afterall. “I am all those things,” Leonidas says again, “I am in pain from loss and life and love. I want freedom from them all.” Stonewort and starfruit and water violets reach to stop his slow chase.
But the magic of her spell is lifted now. “I did not lie. But i do not want them now.” And then, with the tilt of his head, as he draws close to the girl, the smell of dank water clinging to her skin, he looks down, gold into black, “And you don’t want me dead. Not yet. It is not our time, Isolt.” He whispers with a voice of eternities, of universes chasing out, out, out. He reaches his muzzle for her cheek, presses his lips to her, His mouth is warm, alive, thriving. And then he flees her, as he is made to, as he always will, until, suddenly, he will not.
My mother told us a story once, of two wolves destined to consume the world. She told us how hungry they were, how one day their hunger would break chains and there would be nothing left to stop them from laying their jaws against all the earth.
I think I am that wolf, who does not know how to pick its jaws up from the world as it runs through. I think I would not want to even if I knew how.
There is a snarl on her lips when he moves closer. It rises in her throat like poison, like rot, like she is one breath away from consuming the world with it. She takes another step back, and back, and back and Isolt does not know if she is stepping away from him —
or if she is stepping away from herself.
She knows she is a terrible thing, a twisted thing, a thing-that-should-not-exist. She knows the forest that she claims as her own does not love her, cannot love her when each night she lays her teeth against the young-trees and steals their life before they have truly begun to live. Isolt is nothing like her father, who carves away sickness and begs new life to grow in its place.
The new-life burns her, and resists every terrible throb of her magic that struggles to wrap itself like a noose around its neck. She can feel it winning, the same way her sister’s magic always (always) wins over her’s when Danaë grows poppies from the ruins of the saplings.
And oh, how she hates it.
Oh, how she hates herself.
She is still snarling as she steps back in the water. “Then you lie to yourself.” She hopes her voice cuts like a knife, the same way her horn slices through the air when she tosses her head. And Isolt, terrible, monstrous Isolt thinks that at least she is not so foolish as to think she is something other than what she is. She thinks that at least she is not so foolish as this boy, who does not know he is as much in love with death as she is.
She jerks away from him (from his touch, from his kiss, from his magic.) And with the blade of her tail still carving out her anger from every tree, and wildflower, and berry-bush she finds, she runs through the forest like a wolf trying to consume it all.
