kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
S
he has spent a considerable amount of nights during her short, short life so far, with her head tipped back to the stars
She has watched how they spin and clash, how they spiral apart and away from one another, opening up entire chasms between them all. She has watched how they breed black holes, swallowing entire galaxies in the blink of an eye. She has dreamed she was there once, that a ghost, one of her ghosts, took her into the stars. She had reached for the sun and felt it snap beneath her, sending her spinning off into nothingness. She dreams of it still, the quiet, the black, the crushing gravity.
Such things press into her now, a strange weight in her chest.
They had gone to Dawn, her mother had taken her with. The willowy girl had stood in Elena’s shadow, watching as she spoke to people, people she knew, people Elliana did not. She was stuck there, chains hanging from her skin while her entire body burned to be elsewhere. It was only when the blue eyes of her mother turned to her and told her to stay close, but that she could go and play.
The willowy girl had needed nothing else to drop the chains beside her, send them clattering into the snow ground before like ballerina, she twirls into the barren trees. They try to catch her, to reach her, those empty branches trying to wrap around her waist as if they were her partner. They lift her into a leap and she lands in the snow with a graceful patter.
From the day she was born, her legs itched with wanderlust. And this, this is the only thing that soothes it, this moment alone, to stretch her arms from one end of the forest to the other. She thinks if she stretches them far enough they may find one other on the other side, and clasp together.
She dances, she sashays like she on ice, chaines as those short locks of hair try to flutter in her own windstorm like her mother’s does, so effortlessly.
The day passes, and Elliana falls deeper into that forest, no not falls, dancers do not fall, she glides, leaps, turns. This is her dance floor, and the snow ignites underneath the setting sun and the rising moon.
There is part of her that knows she should have gone back sooner. Back before it was dark, before the shadows started to creep, to crawl, to throw themselves upon Elliana’s body as if she were their canvas and they paint.
Part of her that knows her mother will be displeased, and like a petulant child, she had avoided it.
A snowflake falls. It lands on her tongue. It tastes like water, like cold, like sugar, and a little like kisses on foreheads.
She tastes another.
Another.
Until her lips are frozen.
She hears something.
Her lip are so cold she cant move her mouth anymore, when she drags that dark head from the sky. When she does speak, she finds she is surprised that she is capable of it. Her head tilts to the side and she considers him with her cornflower gaze, they pierce from her dark skin. “Hello?” Elliana blinks, shakes her head at such an unclever thing she has just said.
That is when the voices start.
They start like an almost silent buzz, in spring it could be confused for bees humming.
But Elliana has never known spring, she has never known the bees in their trees.
She knows those voices. They comes to her when she closes her eyes to sleep. They cry outside her window, they giggle under her bed, they whisper in her ear just when she thinks she has fallen asleep.
A shape appears before her, a lady she knows all to well. The lady with the bent neck. She doesn't cry, doesn't whimper, just closes her eyes and drowns in the voices of the dead.
widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
T
he winter, newly turned as it is, has already taken with the death of the day some tree-hearts. The snow-crystals have turned to dark-frost in the rising moonlight. Each new death hangs on her tongue like a bit of seed from a fruit too bitter to swallow. The taste lingers and consumes every thought she might have had that was not death, or dying, or lamenting leaves so soft that only she can hear them beneath the howling wind of a coming squall.
Her steps turn into cracking roots and her heart into frozen water trapped in the roots of of rib cage. The hollow spiral of her horn becomes a gnarled branch choked out by ivy, and weed, and rot. In her belly there is a dead rabbit begging for clover. In the space behind her eyes, where there should be music and the dreams of a young-unicorn, there is a bear cub that was too frail to wait for spring. In her bones there a hundred worms and dead lotus petals shivering beneath the cold that has become eternal for them.
But in her wake, in the places where her hooves leave sickle moons in the snow and her shadow breaks sharp against the pine shadows, flowers hang from the new-dead trees in all the colors she knows how to name. Lichen spreads out across a fallen, half-decayed branch, in arrays of green, and gold, and a purple darker than her mother's eyes. There are red poppies blooming strangely from a gathering a holly leaves. The snow blooms with wounds of color instead of shadow and blood.
Behind her Isolt walks, close enough that their shadows become as wide and fearsome of the pines in the moonlight. And beneath them there are bones trembling against the frozen dirt like blade begging to cut their way into the marrow of the world, and the sun, and the air fresh enough to taste of pine and sugar snow. Her thoughts, what should be unicorn thoughts, are fat with their sorrowful screams and bloated with their frosted tears.
She tries not to listen. She tries to drown them out and grow flowers instead of corpses. She tries, but they are like the weeds that choked the gnarled branch to death, or like the winter flakes falling heavy enough to blanket the world in nothing but bone-white. She is dying with the forest in the bone deep cold. She is not a unicorn anymore.
She is..
She is...
She is smiling as she finds the child (or at least what she thinks the shape of a child is supposed to look like, what she is supposed to look like). Her teeth are brighter than her skin, paler against the blushed fragility of her lips. “You shouldn't be here.” The words are harsher than her wavering smile, colder than the bloody sun-warmth in her eyes. They are true, true in the way things made are true (she is too young, too holy, too god-like to lie).
The unicorn steps closer and brushes her nose against the girl's brow in some mess of a kiss and an anointment. “Only dead things belong in the winter forest.” And when she lowers her horn to tap, tap, tap it against the girl's chest, it is clear that only one of them has a heart that beats in melody of spring.
In the winter, all things play dead. Like a mouse frozen in the shadow of an owl, the forest waits for winter to move on and the sun to return to know its safe to move again. But I —
I do not need to pretend.
I am already dead.
O
n either side of them the forest sits still and cold, as if life had been suspended in all the places their shadows touch. Isolt likes to image the trees are holding their breath as they walk by, waiting for them to pass with that sense of knowing all things of the forest possess when something terrible comes upon it.
With so much nothing surrounding them, there is something aches her to be standing still with the forest. There is something in her that aches to bury her horn into the nearest frozen trunk, to twist and carve out its still-beating heart like a surgeon cutting away diseased bits of flesh. All the already-dead and dying things in the ground are whispering to her, and the sound of it makes her ache to pull up the roots of the trees with her teeth to reveal the bones they cradle in their grasp.
But Danaë does not stop. And Isolt does not ask her to.
She only walks with her nose pointed at her sister’s back like a wolf — and she does not look at the flowers that do not pretend to be dead, or the lichen that fills in all the gray spaces with color. She does not look at the way her twin can make life resist the dead-winter’s grip. Even when they hang heavy and low from the tree branches (so heavy she wonders how the branches do not snap beneath their weight, so heavy she finds herself holding her breath and wishing they would), even then she looks with empty eyes past them.
She does not look —
but she cannot stop seeing the colors.
And Isolt feels each one like the rumble of a storm, feels their sting like sunlight against her eyes. It makes her quiver with aching and wanting, makes her lungs tremble like the earth does when the bones are crawling free of it. And she wonders —
was there something trying to crawl free of her?
When they find the girl standing alone (eyes closed, snowflakes frozen on her blueing lips), her heart picks up a war-drum pace that threatens to strip the forest down to the sap frozen in its veins. And she thinks the thing crawling free of her is only the monster of her magic making its way to the outside. She can feel it scratching at her throat, can hear it beginning to roar and burn in her blood. Rot begins to mar the first of her sister’s poppies with black spots, its petals waxing so thin the moonlight shines through it. And if there is a part of her that stops to think no, not those, not her’s — it is drowned out by the wolf in the ground that is beginning to howl inside of her chest.
The girl’s pulse thrums there, right there, in the hollow of her throat — already it is rabbit-quick, and already Isolt can feel her own speed up like the wolf on the hunt after it. Her horn quivers, the tip of it dances in a circle when she swallows and drags her eyes like a scythe to the girl’s face.
Her sister presses in close to the girl, and she presses in close to her sister. The curve of her hip is cold when she presses cheek to skin to try and stop the tremors wracking down her spine. She presses in close and begs her heart to shush, shush, shush again.
But she cannot stop the monster in her from smiling with her lips, and speaking with her voice when it whispers, “would you like to be a dead thing?”
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
E
lliana does not idolize death, nor does she see it as a final end point. How can she when they stand there, pressing around her, pushing the air from her lungs, tightening her skin, pouring cold water down her spine, down her legs, igniting fires in her chest. They are alive. No, they are not alive, they are dead, dead things, but they breathe, shadows can breathe, they can talk, they can move. It is not an end point because there is no end to eternity.
Elli did not draw any wild attention, there was little about her that would. She dances, hesitant and unsure about what she does and who she is. Just a child searching for her meaning searching for her direction, as if some sort of sign would point out the way. That is why she had been here in the woods, skipping her way through until the moon nestled itself on the tree tops, and the snow tucked itself into the once autumn ground. It would seem though, the little shadow whisperer could draw enough attention to bring grim reapers to her door. And if they are the grim reapers, then what does that make you, Elliana?
The in between.
Or something in between that even.
They are not ghosts.
Elliana knows, she would know.
But then why does that shiver run down her spine when she finds them?
When they find her.
Dead.
Dead.
Dead.
Dead. Dead.
They are beautiful. They are the only thing that can make her eyes open and when she does, the bent neck lady is gone. “Don’t leave me,” she says to them in a whisper of wicked shadows and muted starlight. They might not hear her, not when this night is so loud. So so loud. It bangs and clatters. She shouldn't be here, but Elliana is learning to love the noise the dead bring her, so much so she wonders if life is the only thing that guarantees silence, if you do not truly hear sound until your heart stops beating.
The moment the unicorn touches her forehead, Elliana erupts in invisible flames. She doesn't scream, doesn't cry, just sits there silently burning, ash piles in her stomach and she has never felt so sick before. She doesn’t realize there is a reason she would get these gut feelings — that everything her mother has tried to teach her about instincts had actually had a purpose.
Would she like to be a dead thing? “I think I already am.” She tells them. And she smiles. Elliana smiles Elena‘s smile. It had always been Elena’s smile. Like sunshine, innocence, gentle rain. Elli adopted it early on, monkey see, monkey do, but she learned quickly that the more she smiles, the more others would smile back at her. And off the in the distant, between the trees, the bent neck lady returns, staring with those hauntingly vacant eyes in the space where life is supposed to bloom. She doesn’t fully understand the wildness that creeps in her veins. The strange tightness that coils in her chest is incomprehensible to her. She still has the softness of childhood. She steps forward then, lets that horn press into her skin, blood pushes to the surface in the tiniest drops of crimson that blushes her silver skin like lovers meeting. “Take me to the dead.”
widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
A
million instincts of the marrow, an infinite knowing, a tremor of fever need all settle into her heart like a tumor. There it grows roots and gathers children close with a promise of immortality. It sings as her heart has learned how to sing and it thunders like a storm is forever roaring. Her tongue tastes the blood of the girl and the fermented sweetness of her sister’s decay. A tremor settles into the curl of her heart-vein as it flutters against her jawbone.
There just below the girl's eye is a tear-duct that might be convinced to weep blood instead of sorrow. Beneath her young jaw there flutters another heart-veins that might settle the tremor in Danaë’s like a stone to a weed. At the corner of her lips there is a fold of flesh that is ripe for the thread of a vine and the knot of a root.
Danaë grits her teeth, viciously hard, against the urge to step closer as the child does and dig deeper as the child begs for a hundred things a unicorn is made to know. And she thinks that her sister has the right of it, to rip the trees out by their roots to free the dead-things below it and pull the roots out by their buds so that they cannot discover the pain of spring and the pain of hibernation again. She thinks this girl, with her snow-dusted and pale lips, might be saved the pain of the knowing and the tremor of rotten need left in the wake of knowledge.
“You are wrong.” she says as she licks the lingering tang of copper from the air caught in her teeth. Her heart, her magic, her rot, thrills at the taste like a sparrow at a storm wind. She wants to snarl as her sister does. She wants to howl like the wolf in the ground. She wants to feast and rend and ruin.
She wants---
“I will give you a rose instead of a heart if you want to be taken to the dead.” A snarl trembles behind her smile because the dead belong to unicorns and not to horses. And she gnashes her teeth at the thought of giving them to anything else but flowers, and rot, and her sister.
It’s into her sister that she leans as she draws her horn from the girl’s flesh. She looks longingly as the drop of blood that falls from it like rainwater toward the seeds slumbering beneath the inches of snow. And she starts to think of the hare beneath the snow instead of the girl begging to be dead.
Because the dying of things is Isolt’s domain and not her own.
There is a world running beneath this one, where the monsters walk in the light and all the mortals bow at their feet. I dream of it sometimes. I dream of a world where the trees have eyes and the ivy grows nooses hanging from their branches.
But then I wake up. And I hear the dead calling. And I feel my sister's heart beating against my own. And I think —
I think that other world is not so far away when I press my horn to her’s.
N
o one has ever asked them to stay before.
Isolt does not have to pretend that she is some beloved thing. She is a monster, alone in the world save for her sister, and monsters like them were not welcomed sights in the court. She knew it every time their eyes followed her as she walked by like sheep watching a wolf stalk amongst them, every time mothers pulled their children closer until after her shadow had passed. And her heart, her magic, her rot, every terrible, lovely part of her reveled in it the way murder-birds reveled in the carnage of a battlefield.
But this girl — this child with her eyes the color of spring skies and with her brow marked with symbols of love instead of death — she had asked them to stay.
Isolt's lips peel back into a smile.
She smiles the way coyotes smile as they lord over their kills.
And as her sister presses into her side and she feels the tremor of her heart just below her skin, she feels her own heart begin beating to the death-song of her sister's organs. She wants to know what the drop of blood hanging from Danae's horn tastes like. She wants to pull every last drop of blood from this girl's body and water all the roots and bones of the forest with it, so that her sister might grow them a graveyard garden from the ruins.
You are wrong Danaë tells her, and Isolt hums her agreement. "If you were dead, your blood would be black and thick and rotten." She whispers the words through her smile, and presses the curl of her horn into her sister's neck. “You would know."
For a long while she stares at the child, watches her lips turn blue like her eyes. And when her sister smiles around a snarl she only sighs like the leaves trembling lonesomely on their branches above them.
"The dead are already here."
She blinks long and slow, while their heartbeats fill the spaces between them and the roots lying half-frozen in the ground begin to tremble at the sound of it. Even the forest recognizes its unicorn twins as monsters. "Can’t you feel them, waiting in the dark? They're crawling around beneath your hooves, crying for their eyes that do not see. Now, reaching out. Do you not feel it?”
Her smile is sharp, sharper than any unicorn has a right to be. But Isolt is no unicorn.
She steps closer, and no longer is she thinking of all the colors she does not know now to make. She thinks only of red, red blood, red tears, red eyes staring at them from between the trees. There is both a promise and a warning in the way she twists her horn to point in the darkness of the forest behind Elliana.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
S
he was so young that day she met them—and yet she will leave them feeling entirely too old in her young body. This feeling, it will fade after a few days of playing with Nic, hearing bedtime stories, and losing herself in her paintings.
But right now, the emotion is fresh and she stands taller, braver, or maybe we grow more foolish as we age. They have made her older, for she was not born this way, but they are shaping her, making her, even if they do not realize it.
She was so young the day she met them.
She stands at their feet as if they are not capable of terrible, horrid, deadly things. Or perhaps it is because she is capable of such things too. There is a sound, a trilling call that she would compare to that of a bird if she had to, but she knows it is not a bird. And she does not want to look into the darkness. The darkness that comes and keeps coming, as it always does. And as always, the bent neck lady with it.
Isolt smiles and it spread like blood from a wound as a smile slips over Elliana’s lips. And she smiles not like the coyote, but like the crow who is just out of reach, who knows about the death around them, and knows there is so very little they can do about it. So they smile because they know death better than most and they know not to be afraid.
Elliana is wrong.
If the unicorn says it, then it must be true.
The blind faith is an ill intended gift from mother to daughter.
“I can be wrong,” she says. “And so neither are you,” she says looking at them both. “You are not dead, I would know,” she says. You would know they tell her. “I would know.” A rose instead of a heart. These words would haunt her when she starts not to feel so old anymore, but young once more. It would haunt her as she stares at the roses in her mother’s windowsill and her heart flutters in her chest like petals in the window instead of beating like a drum. “And I would have it,” she says not hungry like the coyote, or pleading like the rabbit, but watchful like the crow.
And she walks.
The dead are already here, she can tell by the way the voices rise and swell around her, a crescendo of buzzing and humming and shaking. There are too many voices, too many sounds in her head to understand what happens around her. She wonders if this is what Nic feels like when she passes from one life into the next. Finally, the buzzing softens and she is brought back to the world. And she sees them, all of them, their forms waver there, the very sad and very dead lot of them. They look at her, finally quiet, and she thinks they are only quiet because them, the unicorns, and Elliana looks at them as if they were gatekeepers, when all along, she too has carried a key. “Did you kill any of them?” She asks because she doesn't want to know, but she thinks she will collapse if she keeps the question inside her head for too long. And then there she is, a clear path between them all: the bent neck lady that haunts her dreams only when she is awake. “They are scared of you,” she notes. “But why am I not?”
widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
M
other told her once, as she watched an eagle carry a trout from the river in his claws, the horses of this world will be so quick, so eager, to offer their hearts to you. That night Danaë had not understood the words. She could not comprehend being so careless with a heart as fragile as one born is, so eager to rip it out of their chests at the hope, that foolish mortal hope, that death is a thing to race towards.
There is no glory in a ghost, no tenderness in a corpse, no love in a crumbled and dried out heart. There is nothing in death but heavy dirt and a bed of stones in which no dream ever comes.
In death there is nothing, nothing at all, until a unicorn comes.
And so she follows the girl as she walks not like a ghost but like the thing that creates it. Beneath her hooves, down in the dark below her shadow, a sparrow sings with a mouth full of roots. A fawn brushes its teeth against a stone like it’s a teat instead of a grave-marker. Squirrels titter in their nests of an eon worth of dead-leaves and fallen pines. An entire world, an entire forest, walks with the unicorns as they follow the girl who can only see the curse of them and not the potential.
Danaë does not answer the child, because she is a child in a why they are not, when she asks her first question. A reaper does not press a kiss to a pale brow caught in a fever and so neither does she as she steps closer and brings with her the tittering squirrels, the singing sparrow, and the sucking fawn. Snow gathers in the spiral of her horn, and fills in the gaunt crease of her spine and the pale planes of her cheeks. Her eyes glimmer in the brightness of the forest in the winter where even the gnarled trees cannot fully chase out the moon’s haunting gleam (and she tries not to think of the way her eyes shine like two holes filled up with blood and nothing else).
If there is a hush in the forest when all the ghosts make a sound she cannot hear it. All she can hear is the way their bodies strain towards the life in her blood like she is both sun and rain to their brittle roots. A hawk joins the sparrow with a scream instead of a song. An owl bays for the moon between his feathers like a wolf bays for blood. They are all she can hear outside the steady call of her sister’s magic to her own.
She steps closer, close enough to feel the weighted darkness of the child’s world more than the winter chill. The darkness swallows up the bloody gleam of her eyes like they are moons in her head instead of eyes. “A child fears the sunlight when they are torn from the womb, before they know any better.” She presses deeper in the darkness, where she can feel the grave buried in the dirt.
And there in the darkness she starts to hum, a mother’s song, to the children who still do not know better.
The dead she thinks she loves do not love her back. They do not love anyone, or anything, least of all a girl who is so eager to join them. They do not think anything at all until I come to kiss them awake.
She does not know, but oh, I only know one way to show her.
L
eading the child deeper and deeper into the waiting forest makes her feel even more like a reaper hurrying the dying along.
And if there has ever been flowers in her heart instead of rot she does not feel them now, not when every drop of her magic is rising to meet her searching gaze, and everything in her is whispering There. Just below the jaw. Strike there. She steps closer, close enough to count the ribs beneath her skin, the vertebrae lining her back. And again she feels the death-song tremor of her heart, the whisper of her rage hollowing itself out into a scream.
All around them the trees are turning into twisted things with claws for branches, reaching out to scrape along their sides as they pass. Isolt can feel the hunger in them, can nearly hear them screaming out. Their roots tremble beneath her hooves and she only rakes the blade of her tail through the dirt and promises them, Soon. She taps her horn against the frozen trunk of a birch and watches rot creep from its unblinking eye. Soon you will have all the blood you could ever drink. And she can almost imagine the slash she carves beneath its eye a smile.
She wonders how Elliana does not see it. How she walks on, and on, and on and never sees the forest that is opening like a wound around her, or the unicorns that smile with hunger instead of joy. How she looks at dead things and thinks of them as friends.
”Stop.”
Her jaw grinds around the word. She wants to reach out and carve it into the girl’s skin, to pull the innocence from her heart with her teeth until she learns to shiver at the touch of death instead of rejoice.
Her eyes are whispering all those bloody promises and more when she steps past and points at the frozen ground with her horn. And every crow, and wolf, and hyena, and bear roaring in her chest falls silent when she sweeps the flat of her blade across the earth and reveals an open grave sank into the earth. Isolt does not have to wonder which of the ghosts clawed its way free of it.
She smiles, and presses the child closer with the tip of her horn against her side. “This one is for you.” Fallen leaves and pine needles create a bed of rot at the bottom of it. And the roots crawling up its sides look to her only like open arms waiting to welcome their child of shadows who does not know any better, home, home, home.
But not yet.
“And when you are ready for it, we will come and find you.” She whispers against her with her teeth against the child’s skin, and presses hard enough that she might feel the warning racing like lightning through her veins.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
E
lli is not in and of herself dark, but that does not stop her from being drawn to the shadows. There was something in her that was curious about the sharp edges and the bloodstained fingers. She could feel herself drawn to it, and in the darkness, it felt like this is only time she truly opened, her heart exposed. Such darkness came in many different forms—in the whispers of shadows, in the stories of ghosts—but it came all the same, and she did not attempt to stop it. Her poor mother.
Everything is crying, everything is screaming, because they are all just on the verge of death. Elli can tell from the chill down her spine, the heat in her legs, the lightness inside her head. (Up, up, up she thinks she could float, if only someone cuts the string loose.)
Four steps, footsteps creak over sable floorboards, to where the secret laid hidden in this forest. From hidden behind trees like a closet, beyond the wooden walls a hand reaches out to her. Elliana wants nothing more than to walk forward and embrace it. Until—
Stop.
Everything in the woods halts, Elli feels frozen in place.
A child fears the sunlight when they are torn from the womb, before they know any better.
But Elliana was not born in the sun. She was born in the darkness of an island of mirrors, with ghosts diving into her soul as if she were more ocean than girl.
This one is for you. “For me?” She says in her silver bell voice.
And when you are ready for it, we will come and find you.
So many questions raced through her mind by the unsteady, irregular beat of her heart; breath; frothy and steaming flowed abruptly from her pores, in a sudden exhale, which racked her body from the pent up awe and fear. Her hind limbs starts to push off as she makes her way towards the thing she already knows. The the thing she knows the bent necked lady came from. Some how, she could breathe again, as the anticipation had shortened, but the roots of trepidation did not release their sickening hold upon the poor subject. In fear and alarm, her head rose, a veil of bond hair falling from one side to reveal a heart shaped birth mark and eyes of blue like glacier eyes.
Before she glances down.
Not yet.
Not yet ready.
Teeth against skin.
She fights the urge to bite her back because for all the death she has seen and heard—she has never tasted it before.
Elliana doesn't remember how she got out of the woods that night. She wont remember for years to come, the she visits the twins on a winter night in the moonlight and stars down at that grave and asks them. “Am I ready now?”
