The music hammers away like a knife at my temples. Each note is another stab, each crescendo a knife flaying me open.
I wonder how they — how any of them — can stand it. Are they not screaming inside? Do they not care that they cannot hear their own thoughts above the noise?
Is it only me?
The music slips away like the screams of the dying when Isolt steps into the overgrown yard. Peace, she would call it, if she had to call it anything — the death of things had always been most peaceful to her.
And now as the silence dips deeper, and the shadows between the lights grow longer, and the vines crisscrossing the ground begin to shiver — Isolt sighs with contentment. The shivers that have been running down her spine since the moment her hooves touched sand in place of snow come more slowly now, less violently. She quivers as finely as sand in an hourglass that has just been flipped back over, soothing the hunger (if only for a minute. Just like the hourglass, the sand is running out, the calm can only last so long.)
The vines are still creeping slowly away from her when she spots the other horse.
It is her blood-colored cloak that catches Isolt’s eye first, a stark familiarity standing pressed between the leaves and the foliage. It is her colors of death, and destruction, and all things in between that makes her turn her head like a wolf looking for the moon.
But it is something else entirely, something she has no words for, that has her creeping slowly forward. Her tail blade drags lines through the grass and vines, cutting open the belly of the courtyard.
And all it takes is one look from the mare’s amber eyes for her to start wondering at all the ways she might pull the sunlight from them.
The wondering gnawing at her belly brings her up to the edge of the booth, until leaves turn black and crumble onto the velvet cloth and rot creeps further and further along it. The candles seem to flicker when she draws closer, and closer, and closer, and she does not pretend it is the wind that makes the flames shiver so close to their wicks. Wonder makes her eyes burn brightly as rubies, when she drags her gaze from one candle, to the next, and the next, and the next — and then finally to Hagar’s face.
Something is whispering in her bones, begging her to turn each drop of her blood to something profane, something monstrous, something made to tear the life from hearts. But her hourglass is nearly full, and for the barest of moments —
Isolt feels almost like a unicorn instead of a beast.
Her voice is whisper-thin, the rasp of winter frost coloring weak lungs black and brittle. And she can almost pretend the coiled thing lying in wait inside of her chest is sleeping instead of only resting when she says, “hello.”
In the darkness behind the table, where the ivy grows thick and tangled, something blinks. Isolt blinks back.
And all the while the sand in the hourglass is draining.
his party is fun, but there’s a reason I don’t envy Miriam, or Pilate, or Adonai for their importance. I do not particularly want to be important, I only want to be seen.
It’s easy enough: I stand at my booth in the courtyard, laughing with rich men and far richer women, smiling in a way that I know they will like. The lights are low out here and the music is softer; all the more ostentatious decoration and celebration is saved for the rooms that can be heard from the street, each one a neon sign that reads: come play.
(Or, I tell myself, to be more accurate, each is a neon sign that says “we are playing without you,” and an arrow that points to a door that’s not there.)
I see her see me before I really care that she does. I am used to being noticed–frankly, one of the only things I do without trying is draw attention, and the other is why I’m at this booth by myself in the first place–but there is something different here. I do not draw her eye like I expect, either with a hint of admiration or some amount of what I can only describe as ‘intimidation’ now that I’m several drinks in.
No. Nothing like that at all. This little girl looks hungry. Starved, almost. When her eyes meet mine it is not in a kind way. I stare at her as she comes. There is something in me that is fear and… an unnameable thing. Excitement.
I don’t want it. I don’t want to know it’s there.
As she draws closer, as the world around me unravels, I am growing impatient. I’m sure it is the way of all deadly things to be alluring, the way deep-sea fish dart through the dark with their own source of light. She is that, for me. A lamp bobbing in the black-blue of the courtyard.
I don’t want it. Really I don’t. But is grows as her shape does, nearer and nearer, until my skin crawling feels more like anticipation than outright fear.
Hello, she says, no more than a sigh on the wind, cutting knife-sharp through the cold night. I imagine the music that floats our way falling in tangible, rotting notes as they touch the planes of her face. A piece of my booth, a scrap of soft, wine-red fabric, falls away from the frame and curls into a gray-black leaf on the ground.
I look back up at the girl. I smile. I do not know if the thing twisting in me is bravery, or stupidity, or both. I don’t want it. I don’t have time to look. “Pilate wouldn’t like knowing you’re doing that to our things,” I say. “but I won’t tell him.”
I want to lean forward, to reach in and smile, but I cannot move at all.
“Well.” I sigh. “Truth or dare?”
@isolt (what's self-preservation hagar has apparently never met her)
I am still screaming inside when she asks me her question. I almost miss it — the way she does not move, caught, frozen, like a hare cowering before a wolf.
It does not make it any better, or any easier, the ache that settles in my horn.
It makes the monsters smile wider.
There is something about the sight of the ivy pressed in around the table that enrages her.
Isolt does not know yet of spring, or that there are plants that refused to die back when winter knocks on their door. She only knew of winter, and how it wrapped itself like a noose around the world and tightened bit by fragile bit, like a cat playing with the mouse it was about to devour.
One day, she knew, the bucket would be kicked out from under their hooves and all the world would live in a darkness more eternal than that which lived in her eyes. But that winter was not yet here. And in the interim, Isolt was the winter that did not know how to relent.
She watches now as the leaves wilt one by one, specks of rot creeping across their verdant faces. There is beauty in the way their edges curl, the way the color shifts slowly in ever-darkening shades of green. Like poetry, she thinks — but that is wrong. Isolt does not know the sound of poetry. She knows only what exists in the gardens each night, when she presses her horn to her sister’s and a wilted garden rises between them like an altar, and the bones of the earth bow at their feet.
And she wonders only what it would look like if they raised their graveyard here, tonight, with the cloaked mare their first offering.
Her horn swings like a spear from one end of the table to the other. On one side, truth — and on the other, dare. She almost pulls away, and tells the girl that neither is more important than the song racing like wildfire across her spine. But she does not turn.
The wondering grows louder, its fangs larger, the holes it scrapes in her belly more painful to bear. And her tail blade begins that heart-beat tap, tap, tapping anew when she points the curl of her horn at the delicate, golden spike decorating the bridge of her nose, and whispers:
![[Image: fhOESb6.png]](https://i.imgur.com/fhOESb6.png)
