I feel like the fires tonight, as dawn creeps closer and chokes them out with fistfuls of sand thrown onto the coals instead of wood. As their flames burn lower, and lower, and lower, but nonetheless hungry. Nonetheless burning.
I feel like the fires —
waiting to be fed.
T
he night has slipped into an echo of bonfires that had earlier reached brightly into the sky. The embers of them glow hungrily in their pits, staring out like a monster of eyes and teeth begging to be fed. But those teeth grow duller, and their eyes less bright, as one by one of them are starved.
Somewhere the sun is waiting to rise.
Somehow the night is holding on a little longer.
And Isolt wonders if this was how Caligo felt, when her rage kept the sun from rising all those years ago. She wonders if one day she could be angry enough to smother even the sun.
She thinks she might.
As the flames burn lower and the smoke weeping off of them thickens, Isolt wanders. Around and around the dying flames laid out in a pattern she does not try to decipher, pausing to stare into the blinking coals of each one and to blink back at them. They seem strangely alive to her — dying things who’s death is drawing near, who’s death she can sense the same way she can sense a bleeding hare in the forest.
And she does not save them. Perhaps it is because she had seen the sorrow in her sister’s eye, when young and old tree-gods alike had been sacrificed to the flames. Maybe it is only because Isolt had never been made for the saving of things, not even a hungry fire that reminds her a little bit of herself.
But she cannot shake the feeling that she is searching for something as she turns from one fire to the next. Something that goes below the magic coiled in her belly, that runs in currents beneath the wave of anger that festers like a rot-filled river through her heart. It feels like a thing she has seen in glimpses in her twin’s eyes, that had always made her look too long and too hard, as if by looking hard enough she might begin to see the marrow of it.
So back and forth across the field she walks, with her tail blade carving out shapes into the beaten earth behind her (shapes that might have shown her the answer, had she turned back to look at them in the same way she looked at the sorrow in Danaë’s eyes.) And each fire only makes that broken feeling in her chest grow wider and wider like a ravine splitting open. Her heart feels like an overripe berry splitting against her twin’s lips. And still she searches, as her lungs turn to flower petals hung up to dry and the roots of them press against her bones. Still that sorrow she does not know how to name mourns when she cannot find the sickness carving away pieces of her.
But when she falls to her knees before the last fire, she thinks she has found it.
It is carved there in the shape of a unicorn in the embers, its glowing red body broken up only by the white ash of the coals in a pattern she wishes she did not recognize.
I wanted to keep going, keep running. I wanted to feel the burn rise-rise-rising in my chest until it- what? What did it feel like to hit my limit? I wanted to know if it was like running into a wall, or crumbling to ash, or nothing at all but the absolute silence that proceeds death, the quiet so heavy it siphons even light itself. But the race was definitively over- I ended it when I crossed the line first.
The thrill of victory only lasted a moment, and then, just like every other memory, it was behind me. Maybe that’s what prizes were really for- to bring back those feelings, which I now craved with an intensity that almost scared me.
But my prize could wait. In the madness that ensued after the fire race, I ducked away before the final ceremony. Even in my exhaustion it was almost too easy to slip away; the smoke and the hazy, flickering firelight welcomed me hungrily, swallowed me whole.
I paced from one fire to another with a leonine hunch of the shoulder and the manic sweeping of my horn back and forth, back and forth like an axe. It came to rest pointing at Isolt, who was on her knees, alone, before the fire. I straightened and stepped forward into the glow.
I was almost unrecognizable. Soot clung to my sweaty body, and my dark eyes reflected the fire as though they were little mirrors. In that moment the world seemed to close in around us so it was just me and her, two pieces without their matching half. My restlessness, my victory, my thoughts all flooded out of me, and the tide that replaced them had attention only for Isolt.
When I spoke I even sounded different, my voice low and hoarse with all the smoke. “Hello again.” I felt we had gotten off on the wrong foot. And perhaps there was no right foot to get off on, not with those sisters, but that wouldn’t stop me from trying. All my life I’ve strived to act on logic and rationality, to think everything through and make decisions based on what was most fair, or what would do the least amount of harm. It was a war against my true nature, for at heart I was a creature of instinct and intuition- and a stubborn longing for harmony which often made me do asinine things.
I didn't know what else to say. I knew I did not need this girl’s approval, or understanding, or friendship... But still I wanted it, a physical kind of wanting that bullied its way to the top of my mind and pressed against my eyes. When I blinked, or turned my head up to the smoky darkness of the nights, I saw the outline of my desire painted all electric-like on the back of my eyelids.
It was not yet dawn, not yet, and surely this night had more magic for me. I leaned in toward the fire and blew, gentle and steady. Heat flared and raced through the coals in streaks of brilliant orange-whites and deep, pulsing reds. At the end of my breath they settled once again into the resigned smolder of things claimed by a dying fire.
I am finding the pit of my own sorrow tonight, the one that lies beneath the hunger, beneath the rage, beneath the endless need to become. I wonder if this makes me more like my sister now, if it is making me soft — I wonder if I should let it.
B
eneath her knees the ground feels like a rotten thing, trampled by the hooves of the many horses dancing around the flames, singed by the fires each time they flared. There is soot and bits of kindling pressing patterns against her skin, bruising her legs where they press too sharply into her.
Lichen begins to bloom like flowers around her knees. Mushrooms rise on long and slender stems like the true-ghosts of the night. The last splinters of logs that had escaped the fires turn now to ash beneath her touch.
And Isolt stares into the dying flames at the unicorn that is dying with them.
She wants to stir the embers with her horn, to make the unicorn rise and run, run, run away from the flames. She wants to breathe life into her the way she breathes life into the dead, to beg her to become in a way she never can. She wants — oh Isolt wants a thousand things, a hundred feelings other than this hunger, a fire that gives as much as it takes, a heart that beats like the wing’s of a sparrow soaring to freedom instead of thundering like an eagle going to war.
The red unicorns wants a horn that feels more a weight than a weapon.
She stares down at the sooty unicorn and wishes she could take her place.
And she is leaning forward, reaching into the dying embers, her horn falling, falling, falling towards it, when the voice interrupts her. Isolt flinches, an ear flickering back towards the girl from the island (another unicorn that does not belong here, not in her court of death chasing after life chasing after death.) Even beneath the soot, beneath the smoke in her voice, she recognizes her. The beat of her heart, too-fast and too-strong, too full of life beneath her fragile skin, oh it calls to her.
Isolt would always recognize the things she has marked for death.
She does not turn to greet her. She does not whisper a hello back to the unicorn, or lift her eyes from the mirror she imagines the fire to be. It is not until Aspara leans closer (closer enough that Isolt might count each eyelash fluttering against her cheek when she blinks), and blows gently against the coals that she finally turns to her.
It is as if she stoked the dying bonfire in her own chest, instead of the one before them.
“Do not,” the snarl rises unbidden to her lips, an instinct; she almost cannot stop the way her tail again becomes a weapon, singing through the air as it races to the girl.
But then she blinks.
The blade of her tail falls to the ground with a sigh. And the snarl withers in her throat like a leaf in autumn, sinking down into the depths of her. She swallows, and tastes ash.
And when she speaks again her voice is a whisper, a broken thing that feels as though it has burned as low as the fires. “Let it die.” And she tosses her wants, her wishes, her aches into the dying fire so that they, too, might die with it.
