ISOLT
It feels more like a dream than a nightmare that way.
In the mid-night hush where the shadows grow ever darker between the garden walls, the two unicorns gather around a grave that only they know to exist. While the rest of the world slumbers on without ever hearing the jaws of the long-dead wolf snap shut, they lean in closer to listen to the words it has forgotten how to make and whisper a thousand things back to it in the language of the dead. Come awake, they say, to all the things that have no right to do anything but sleep.
There is no moon to act as their witness tonight.
The witching hour belongs to them. The darkness and all the things hiding within it is their’s and their's alone.
Isolt presses her horn to her twin’s, hollow spirals fitting together with a sigh of bone against bone. And as the cold things in the ground begin to hum, and sing, and stir, the unicorn feels every black and rotten chamber of her heart begin to tremble in response. Everything in the garden, everything in her is already dead or dying and oh, it feels as holy as it does profane. She is smiling even as the aching twists like a knife between her ribs — and when she looks down into the darkness of a shallow grave reopening —
the darkness smiles back.
“Then who are we to tell them no,” she whispers to her sister, and all the while the magic in her bones is singing yes, yes, yes. It wraps itself like a noose around her twin’s, around the corpses, around the flowers, and it drags them all through the half-frozen dirt.
Her heart starts to beat like a rabbit’s, quick and hard, when the first skull appears with roots holding its jaw shut. “Come.” She does not ask, she never asks — it is only a command, one her magic is all too willing to obey. Vertebrae by vertebrae, each spiny process shining white and new in the night, the creature drags itself out of the earth. A half-rotten paw digs its claws into the earth, its spine twisting when it lifts its head to look up at the unicorns lording over it like gods (your masters, Isolt wants to correct it, but she does not.)
Still in the ground, vines knit the fingers of another corpse back together against, so they can join the first in digging itself free. One was never enough for her, even when she feels her lungs quiver with want of air or watches the first trail of blood drip, drip, drip from her sister’s nose. She presses her shoulder to Danaë’s, blood against bone, for want of steadying herself as much as her twin.
Because it is the purple blossoms pressing themselves against the bones, and the vines twisted around them in place of tendons, that makes the beating of her heart sound something like keening. Rage flashes unchecked in her eyes, burns hot in her veins. And when she lifts her nose and scents the air like a wolf, the flowers smell only like the sweet and fermented tang of death.
Still, it is the only perfume she wants to wear.
@danaë ❁
"wilting // blooming"
"wilting // blooming"
