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Isolt
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#1






isolt.
There has always been a monster inside of me, gnawing at my heart like a wolf at a bone. I can feel it now, hollowing out my chest like it's making a den of me. Sometimes I wonder if I have ever been anything but a temporary skin for something terrible.


The swamp was full of dead things.

She could smell them all rotting, could feel the way the air hung thick and stagnant against her skin like the breath of some terrible beast. She could feel the way the swamp was pulling everything apart, bit by bit, bone by bone, drawing out the marrow and the sap and the life. It curls around her, as tangible as the vines that creep across the sodden ground.

Each time she steps over them she hears the soft death-lament singing softly in her wake. It chants in time to her own poison heartbeat, each throb, each step, each lyric a new death. The fog gross thicker, sickly-sweet, hanging like a funeral veil she drapes over the swamp. And she, she is the grim reaper, the shadow, the beast moving between the trees and wading deeper into the tangled wild.

And yet —

For each leaf that falls like a sinner bowing at her feet, there are dozens more whispering overhead. For each flower that wilts and blackens against her lips there is always another that brightens once her shadows moves past. Everywhere she looks Isolt sees only the trees sucking up the poisoned swamp-water like wine, growing tall despite the way their branches sag and their bark turns sallow and soft.

Everything in her is screaming at the sight of it. The wolves in her bones are howling and screaming and begging for her to devour, begging for to consume the forest whole so she might sate her hunger with it. Her tail lashes like a whip behind her, gouging scars into the nearest water-gum trees.

Her reflection, when she looks into that rotten black water, does not look like a blood red unicorn. She looks like only a shadow of a girl with a bit of bone weighing heavy on her brow. Every day it feels more like a weapon than a weight, every day she aches to see the hollow curls of it filled.

And today, like every other day, she swallows down her heart when it leaps into her chest.

And she turns away, and presses deeper into the swamp. She presses on, until dead leaves and moss tangle in her hair and mud stains her cheeks. She presses on, and with each step she feels more and more like a wolf wearing the clothing of a sheep, the grim reaper wearing the life of the swamp and pretending she is not strangling the life out of it as surely as the rotten water is drowning it. She presses on, until she sees the form of another moving like a ghost between the trees (and everything in her blood begins to sing at the sight of it.)

And with the silent forest pressing in all around her, she follows after him like a wolf following the scent of blood.



§

i wonder what i look like
in your eyes


« r » | @Leonidas









Played by Offline Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14
Signos: 520
Inactive Character
#2

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.



He knows when she begins to follow him. Leonidas has spent a year as a boy within the dangerous grasp of nature. She taught him swiftly how to learn when he was being hunted. Now he feels that shiver up his spine when he hears the way the foliage whispers as feet step over leaves and branches yield to passing limbs.


The child whispers after him. In the shadowed light of the swamp she is little more than shadow dappled in moonlight, her small horn a shard of bone. The older boy pauses and turns his head, just enough to see her slim, small, shadowed form and the gleam of her eye.


She is a dark and strange creature. Her presence is that of cool fingers upon his spine, cold like death. Her small strides are lupine, even in spite of her too-long limbs that pick their spidery way through the underbrush.  The boy walks, slowly meandering, leading her, guiding her deeper into the swamp until it opens out into a clearing he knows. The umbrella of trees part here and light seeps down. He had slept beneath the stars, their light a blanket to warm his chilled bones.

She is only a girl, barely more than a baby and Leonidas does not fear her, but all the same he has met a colt who tricked him and stole his life as if he were a fountain to be drunk dry. She is a small girl, but oh, she could be so much more than that. 


Leonidas steps out into the clearing and turns to face her. “Welcome little wolf.” The boy breathes as he stands, bathed in light, his gold hair and feathers limned. He stands a king, a god within his clearing and watches the child come.

@Isolt <3
“Speaking.”
credits










Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Isolt
Guest
#3






isolt.
I have known hunger. It claws at me now, hollowing my belly no matter how much sweet-clover and spring-grass I fill it with. This hunger goes beyond that. This hunger keeps me awake at night, whispering inside of my bones like a beast whispers of war.

It hungers for the whole world.


Her mother-monster taught her well.

She taught her how to walk quietly, and to leave no hoof prints in the mud behind her like a ghost hurrying along after its body. She taught her how to slip like a knife in the spaces between the trees and their shadows, to cut straight to the heart and find all the places where the blood runs fastest and the darkness sinks deepest.

And like the twisted daughter-monster that she is, Isolt learned well. 

But her blood is singing louder than the memory of her lessons. And for as made in magic as she is, she is also a thing born from flesh. And every time the wild boy’s heart beats she can feel the sound of it echoing like a drum beat in her bones, calling to all the terrible and violent parts of her.

So she follows him. And the deeper into the swamp they go (and the more dead things that surround them and call her home, home, home) the less careful she becomes. She is a starving wolf in winter, with a belly full of hunger making her heart beat faster. The blade of her tail begins to tap along to its rhythm, as he leads her ever deeper into the swamp. And all the while Isolt wonders what a foolish thing he must be, to lead a unicorn like her into the darkness.

Didn’t his mother warn him of the monsters that liked to hide in the dark?

She is smiling when she follows him into the clearing. The light does not shine on her the way it shines on him. She is drab and colored like mud and dried blood, but he — oh, he is as bright as the sun. But bright things never lived long, she knew. Like stars they always collapsed in upon themselves and died, and she would be there to drink the sunlight from his bones when he did.

“If I am the wolf, what does that make you?” she whispers to him from the edge of his clearing, where she begins to circle like a rabid thing. And perhaps she is, bloated as she is with a magic that wants and wants.

Her mouth starts to water. And as the wind starts to sing through the sharp curls of her horn, Isolt licks her teeth.



§

i wonder what i look like
in your eyes


« r » | @Leonidas









Played by Offline Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14
Signos: 520
Inactive Character
#4

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.



He leads the little wolf girl to the middle of the swamp. He stops and turns to watch her. Though he stands taller than her, grown with time, muscled with burgeoning puberty, she does not falter. The girl begins to prowl like a hungry thing woven together by monstrous magic.


In his mind are tales his mother whispered of her birthplace where ancient magic twisted itself into ungodly monsters and Time spun itself trapping webs and ripped holes between worlds. It was a place of dragons and giant graveyards where bones reached up from the bed of an ancient long-lost sea. It is like the wolf-girl is from such a world.


He does not know that in their blood is riftland magic. That his parents and the wolf-girls mother are from the same strange world as the stories his head is full of when he looks at her. But maybe it is their shared blood that has him standing calm and bright and knowing though he understands nothing at all. Instinct alone breathes magic into his bones. The wolf girl is the chaotic magic of the Riftlands, he is the Time.


The wild-wood boy watches when she licks her teeth, hungry and keen and asks him what he is. Leonidas, glows bright, radiant next to her drab skin. What is he? A self-appointed keeper of the Novus wildlands? A stag, a boy-king whose kingdom is nothing and yet everything (to him)? A child without a father or a mother yet with an ancestry that reaches beyond worlds and time and space. He looks to the girl and finds something familiar in her hungry, savage being. 


“What do you think I am?” The boy asks in turn, his voice breaking, shattering over the words. He does not flinch at its breaking. Now is not a time to be embarrassed by the passing from childhood to adulthood. 


The more pertinent question for this wolf-girl is, however, “What do you want me to be?” Between your teeth, over your tongue, bled out like ripe fruit? Time never succumbs to magic so easily. And so, like any good wild-wood boy, born of and master of Time, he breathes lightly, “I am the cheetah.”


@Isolt <3
“Speaking.”
credits










Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Isolt
Guest
#5






isolt.
I do not know what it means to be a child. I do not know what it is like to grow slowly, or cautiously, to not feel my bones breaking as they stretch. I have never known the innocence of a newly-born thing, or of something lost in the woods.

But I know magic. And I know blood. And I know the way his is calling, calling, calling —


Isolt is not a child. Not in the sense that any thing made in magic can be a child.

She is still counting how many days it has been since her birth, since she shared a womb with her sister and their mother whispered to them that the world would bow at their feet. And she is still surprised to see leaves sprouting along every slender edge of the branches overtop them, when all she has known was their winter-bareness.

But she does not need to learn what magic looks or sounds or feels like. That she was born with, that her bones learned as they were being formed.

Her mother had told her stories of the world she came from, that world of magic-gone-wrong and hunger-that-does-not-end. She had told her the story of how she was made to hunt those that lived there, how that hunt ran now in Isolt’s own blood. And mother-monster had promised that one day, she would learn the source of all her hunger.

Isolt had wondered how it could ever matter why she was hungry, when it only ever seemed important that she was always hungry. But now, oh now she knows.

Now she can feel the boy’s blood running hot and fast in his veins, can see the delicate swell of it along his jaw (ripened like a grape, she thinks; so ready to burst.) That song her mother told her about is there, singing softly but there, and all she has to do is reach out with her horn and take it —

She is drooling as she steps closer, and closer, and closer.

“Prey,” her whisper is so soft, so quiet, barely a sigh, that she is not sure that he hears her. Still she presses closer. The distance between them grows smaller and smaller, the shadows of the trees are forgotten now as she drags her tailblade through the moonlight.

She is almost close enough to lunge now, and she traces the curve of his jaw in her mind, looking for the best place to detach the bottom of it. He is talking still, and she could almost whine as the frustration rises higher and higher inside of her lungs.

Her ears flicker back against her skull. “Then tell me, can a cheetah outrun his death?”

Can you outrun me? her eyes whisper from the darkness. And slowly, slowly, her horn begins to lower.



§

i wonder what i look like
in your eyes


« r » | @Leonidas









Played by Offline Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14
Signos: 520
Inactive Character
#6

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.


Leonidas is not surprised by her hunger. The stories of their mothers’ home are woven into their beings. The older boy remembers tales of huntresses and hunters, of a unicorn who hunted like a lion and screamed her vengeance at the sky. 


“You do not control the fates.” The wild-wood boy says, his golden eyes dark as he surveys the child that hunts him, drooling like a beast. She whispers, her voice light with youth. It is barely there in the wind, his ears have to twist to catch them, but catch them they do. “My death is not at your hands,” Leonidas does not know when death will catch up with him and gather him into his arms. But he knows it is not now and it may not be for an eternity. Yet he does not entirely trust death not to be hidden, like a blocked road concealed by a bend - sudden, surprising, unavoidable. 


Her eyes are claws. He wonders how something so soft, so warm in colour can gouge at his jaw with a mere look. She is the hunter here. Small and slim and wickedly dangerous. The boy grins at her. It is a reckless gesture, yet he has survived dinosaurs and collapsing islands and the standing still of time and natural disasters - so many things he has endured alone and learnt how to live. He looks to the little girl, small and slim and dangerous, yes, but he has faced worse. Leonidas knows how to live with adversity roaring like a lion at his flanks. His body bears the scars of its teeth, deep and long and everywhere upon his torso. 


“No one can ever escape death,” Even his mother whose lives are multiple, even she let death catch her eventually. “Though the cheetah is an instrument death. It is death. Just like me.” The boy says as the earth about her springs its Spring flowers. The plants and grasses and flowers grow and wilt and die. At the command of his magic the earth about her feet is wilted and riddled with death like winter. 


The boy gasps, suddenly weary from his magic. His eyelids are heavy, that gaze of his soft and warm. “Why do you wish me dead, little death?”


@Isolt <3
“Speaking.”
credits










Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Isolt
Guest
#7






isolt.
I have never stopped to wonder why I am like this. I have never stopped to question the magic that made me, or the love, or the hunger, or the almost-violence.



I do not know how to stop. 



I only know that his blood is a song I have always been chasing. And I will find the end of it, even if it means spilling every last drop along the way.


There is a snarl rising in her throat. She is choking on it, drowning in it — it fills her lungs like water and she, oh, she —

She is smiling as she takes death between her teeth and pulls.

And she is smiling as she steps closer, and closer, and tastes the recklessness hanging like a veil around him. She fills her belly with his arrogance, grows drunk on his confidence — and when he grins back at her she is counting his teeth like pearls. And Isolt wonders how much prettier they might look strung upon one of his tendons, so that they might hang around her neck instead.

Isolt does not tell him that he is wrong (but oh! how she wants to!). But it is there in her eyes, in the blood-red determination of them that sparks like embers in a fire. And it is there in the very fabric of her being, in the magic that is printed across her veins, her bones, her muscles that whispers to her yes, yes, yes when she leans forward and wonders, is this it?

Is this what I was made for?


Her mother had told her the story of her creation once, only once. And Isolt had listened to it in quiet rapture, drinking in every inch of her mother’s bloody beginning until she had dreamed rivers of it. And when she had slipped away into the gardens that night she had pretended that she was the unicorn named Death, because Thana had promised to her that all the world would bow to her one day.

That one day could not come soon enough. Not for a unicorn born of seed and hunger, of rage and love. Not for the girl who was born remembering winters from years past, who was knitted together with the magic of the Rift and of gods.

“You are not death,” the blade of her tail carves out her rage in lines across the earth. “You do not know what death is, but I—“ I will show you, the violent color of her eyes promises.

The plants he killed turns to dust at her hooves in an instant, until mold and lichen are blossoming over the bones of it. And even as the swamp-child gasps and wilts the circle of death around her hooves only grows, and grows, and grows. It grows until her rage and her sorrow and her hunger turns every plant and grass and flower as black as her heart, until the ground beneath his own hooves releases its life with a gasp. The bones in the earth tremble, a egret raising its sun-bleached beak high into the air, an alligator tightening its jaw with vines instead of muscles.

And Isolt does not waiver. She steps forward and each step is the death of another root, and stem, and petal, and leaf. She steps forward and lays her horn like a promise against his brow, bone touching the soft gold of his antlers.

“Because all things must die,” she whispers against his skin, “and the dead will become my army.”

And she presses harder.



§

i wonder what i look like
in your eyes


« r » | @Leonidas









Played by Offline Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14
Signos: 520
Inactive Character
#8

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.


He will know when he meets Danae how they are twins, how strange magic blooms like death at their will. In the moment when he realises, as he meets this girl’s twin, he will think not just of how they are so utterly similar, but how they are so different too.


Leonidas knows he will not die here, today. He knows it is not his time because Time whispers it over his skin. Not yet it says. Ever a young, curious boy he thinks to ask it, If not now then when? but Time does not let him know things like that. Such things are for his mother alone to know. She is the one who can travel Time and its magic. She could take him to the place where he dies and he would look, curious, to see whether there is a girl with blood red skin and crimson-wanting eyes stood over him with death upon her lips and stained down her horn.


“It is not my time to die.” The boy says as she presses closer. He thinks of all the unicorn girls he has met: each one has pressed their horns upon his antlers and carved their warnings deep into his tines. He wonders if he bears the mark of them all now, like runes, pointing to the old, dangerous magics of unicorn girls born into war and death and justice. 


This unicorn girl, she steps closer and closer. He lets her come, finding stillness, almost as if she is an enchantress, her eyes a form of hypnosis. His blood sings for her, his heart beats wetly in her chest and he wonders, at his end, how much blood he would spill at her command. Leonidas does not deny her his corpse for her war. He does not deny her anything but his death today.


Her horn presses against a tine. They meet with the sounds of swords upon a battlefield. He is used to this noise, it has become the music with which each encounter with a unicorn girl is danced to. Like metal to metal their horns cry out when the girl presses harder and steps in. “I do not doubt it,” Leonidas whispers to her like a lion whispers to a tiger. “I will give you my death.” The boy whispers, as if his life is not his own, as if he speaks into a fate he knows nothing of, that he cannot help except fulfill. “But you will have to chase me for it to the end of days.”


The boy leaps away from her. He is nimble and lithe as he leaps over leaves and brush and disappears into the woodland. All the remains is the song of their horns that resounded like the chimes of war. Leonidas wonders if he has made a shadow of her, if the death he lost when he gained immortality has been replaced by this girl, who will hunt him, darkening his spine, her teeth, her ravenous hunger for his death biking at his heels. He would wait for her, his little death and make space for her upon his road of immortality until the day he trips, until the day he looks at her with soft eyes and she leaps at him with sharp teeth and his death held fast between her jaws.


@Isolt <3
“Speaking.”
credits










Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Isolt
Guest
#9






isolt.
I can already taste his death upon my tongue, caught like a seed between my teeth. I am holding it there against my mandible, as I grind my jaw like I am gnawing on bones.

I know his death is not today. But I know, too, how he will die.

And I wonder if he can see it there in my eyes, in my teeth, in the spiral of my horn that is aching for his blood to fill it.


The feel of his antlers against his horn, of his skin beneath her lips (so close to her teeth, so achingly close —) Isolt is coming alive.

She can feel her blood singing sweetly in her veins like a pack of coyotes as they fall into the chase of a wild rabbit, a thousand yips and bays and snarls tearing the landscape of her arteries apart. And all those coyotes, all those vultures, all those monsters tearing holes in her stomach and reaching up her throat with their claws (reaching for him) are begging her to dip the tip of her horn there, to break the fragile skin of his temple and push, push, push until he becomes just another risen thing bowing at her feet.

She wants to. Oh how she wants to listen to that magic growing teeth and thorns in her blood. How she wants to be like her mother-monster who does not relent, who does not give, who only takes, and takes, and takes.

But the song his blood is singing to her’s is so sweet, and his voice as he speaks of death is like honey she wants to drink. So she only leans in, and she listens, and she whispers to the wild things not yet. Just a little bit longer.



She wants to hear him beg for it, before she unmakes him.

She wants him to look at her like she is the true-god, the new-god, the only god who is able to end his fragile life and grant him a new sense of immortality (one spent in worship of her, with golden poppies for eyes and chrysanthemums filling the gaps of his spine.)

She wants her sister to be here when she rips his soul from between his ribs and gives it to her like a gift, like a garden waiting for flowers to root and bloom.

So when he leaps away, she lets him. And the egret and the alligator and the snapping turtle all weep pollen and crumble into bones and roots when she commands them to follow him. They are not strong enough yet, not when she is alone, not when she is still-young in magic.



But oh! How those bones tremble when she stalks after him slowly through the swamp, how paws and claws try to dig their way free of the ground and drag themselves behind her. Her tailblade is making music as she drags it through the mud, and shears through branches and bushes with it. To the end of days, it whispers with every swing, with every cleaved-off head of a cardinal flower, you will see my following you.



She does not run. But Isolt is savoring the taste of him left on the wind, as she lifts her nose like a wolf and begins the chase that will last a lifetime.



§

i wonder what i look like
in your eyes


« r » | @Leonidas









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