widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
A
unicorn, as made as she is, does not understand that it is sculpted as stone is carved. She does not know that her horn is nothing more than an altar to gods living in the forests of her organs and the steeples of her spinal cord. Her eyes do not know that they do not see the world as others do, that there is something fragile in the movement of her sinew over her bones.
She does not know that she is other.
She only knows that she is and that she is not alone.
And she is and is not alone as she streaks through the forests upon her legs that are inches longer than they were a moment ago. Her atoms are immortal, and holy, and profane, and they are feral as they clamour and clash in the shape of her. The pillar of her horn turns to weed reaching for the dappled rays of winter sunlight between the trees around which they weave.
Each moment, each second, each echoing bird cry reverberating in the hollow places of her fusing joints, she becomes fleeter. What race fawns had begun is being ended by the sleek and elegant sighthounds. Her bell-chime laugh turns smoky as a wildfire. Her stride turns to thunder instead of fox.
“We’ll have to be faster if we want to catch him.” The unicorn laughs in her new-smoke voice as she squints against the sunlight. Ahead the stag leaps over a fallen pine and the crack of his legs over the dying branches opens the jaws of some slumbering thing in her body. Her limbs stretch out until her belly is brushing against the low saplings just barely surviving above the inches of snow. The shadow she casts turns long as an owl’s wings as she leaps over the fallen pine.
And she is too lost in the thrill, that feral thrill, to notice the fungi and flowers blooming between the rotting pinecones. They follow the line of her shadow and taper off as the point of her horn tapers off into the dappled golden-light.
A unicorn, as made as she is, loses herself to the hunt and calls it nothing more than breathing.
When I run like this, I feel less like a unicorn and more like a killer.
Another flower, or leaf, or tree, or rabbit dies with each step, and the ground trembles like I am nothing more than an earthquake tearing it open. I can feel myself changing, growing, twisting -- but never blooming.
I am not sure I like what I am becoming.
S
he is running, but she does not feel it.
Her hooves are carving moons into the frozen earth and her tail blade is tearing limbs from trees as she passes, and she does not feel any of it. She does not feel her heart, trembling as it tears apart and knits itself back together as more and more blood rushes through it. She does not feel her lungs, fluttering like butterflies clawing their way free of a cocoon. She does not feel how her muscles are stretching, and her bones breaking, and her horn spiraling further and further from her brow.
She does not feel the way her body grows with every stride like it’s trying too late to contain all of her magic, like it’s too small for her monster soul. She does not see the branches as anything other than diseased parts of the trees that need to be cut away.
But Isolt hears the stag’s breath, quick and heavy, as he pants. And she feels the thud of his hooves against the frost when he stretches his neck out and sails over a fallen pine. She feels the way his blood is calling out to her blood, how every bit of his body is begging to be unmade even when he is telling it to stay alive. She smiles.
And she nips her twin’s shoulder when she draws close enough, gentle as a winter kiss. “We are faster.” Stride by stride, step by step, second by second they are faster. The immortality blazes hot and bright as a wildfire in their veins, turning cells to tissues and drops of blood to gallons.
She laughs as her sister does, lets it carry them like the notes of a song through the forest. Inside of her chest there is a wolf howling the lyrics, and Isolt loses herself in the song of it as she chases after her sister chasing after the stag.
widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
D
anaë does not know that her song, the one echoing in scripture through her holy heart, is a killing sonnet. She does not know that it is not hope, or joy, or freedom taking flight like a sparrow in her chest. The humming vibration on her lips is not prayer but eulogy and she does not know it. She is too made, too grown like a weed in the dry season, to know that there is nothing kind in the hummingbird flutter of her heart.
To her, to a new-made unicorn, there is only the sparrow in her chest and not the sun-charred bones of its corpse. There is only the song in her hooves, in their hooves, cracking through the snow like wounds instead of weapons. There is only the crashing of the stag’s fear breaking up the song, the silence of their hunger, like waves on the immortal and immoral shore of them.
But had she known the terror of her form, her joy, her melody, she might have closed her eyes and sobbed.
She would have sobbed and then she would have still laid her teeth at his throat while her sister tore off his horns.
Danaë would have, she would have done it all, because she does not know how to do anything else but sing, and sing, and scream of death.
Their hooves continue their race, and the stag continues the last of his breaths, and the snow continues to pool in her spine like she’s branch instead of flesh. Her legs stretch, and burn, and grow, as she tries to tell her body to run fast, to be predator instead of child, god instead of unicorn. The stag stumbles (his first of many) and her heart leaps at the fear rising in the musk of his scent. It bellows a roar that her heart calls a hallelujah.
The stag stumbles again. She quickens, and grows, and opens her mouth to howl, howl, howl at the creatures racing away from all the places in which their shadows fall. Somewhere her heart sets into the idea of sorrow, like a sun at the horizon.
Somewhere she feels broken in all the ways a unicorn never is.
But when the stag stumbles for a third time she pauses on the corpse of a mighty oak and lifts one hoof into the air like a lion at a watering hole. Her heart flutters again in her chest and her lungs tremble on an exhale of winter. The point of her horn twists towards the jugular of that stumbling beast like a divining rod.
She is evolution in that pause.
And that is the only way in which she knows to ask Isolt to save her from her own torment that she still thinks is nothing more than song, or religion, or right.
The truth of it is written in every sharp point of my body, in the way my horn has always felt more a weapon than a weight, more gruesome than I am beautiful. And most days the difference between being soft and being sharp is drowned by the roar of blood and magic filling every hollow part of me.
But somedays, I wonder what I would look like — if I were not myself.
I
f there is ever a moment in which she thinks about sobbing instead of snarling, she does not show it. And if ever she wants to save the stag instead of kill it, then the thought lives only in the spaces between her heart beats and is swallowed up by her lungs the moment they begin to expand again.
Isolt does not try to pretend to be anything other than the monster in the woods with a smile too sharp and full of teeth.
But her sister — her sweet sister, her unicorn-soul, her other-half — is breaking as much as she is being formed. And as they fly side-by-side through the forest close enough that their shoulders brush with every stride, Isolt feels her heart stumble and catch the pace of Danaë’s.
Ahead of her, two versions of the same blood-red unicorn run:
One of them runs with madness rampant in every step, tongue lolling, eyes blazing like twin rubies. Every stride forms her into more of a hunter, every step brings her that much closer to her prey. And every time the stag stumbles she leaps, jaws opening wide to catch his breath before he does.
That version of her does not stop when her sister-unicorn does.
But there is another Isolt that is still almost-soft, one that has not yet grown into the monster she knows she has only to choose to become. That Isolt is still growing, her tendons still stretching, her heart still racing to catch up with the blood that seems only ever to multiply and burn in her arteries. And she watches as that version of herself pauses beside her sister atop that rotten, fallen oak, and presses their quivering shoulders together.
Isolt watches, and she is not sure which bloody unicorn she wants to be. The hunter or the protector, the killer or the savior. The sharp edge of the blade telling her we can, we can, and we will — or the soft curl of their ribs fitting together as one.
She wants to say that the sound of her sister's heart calling out to her own is stronger than the thrill of the hunt.
So why then does she fly past the other unicorn, tucking her knees over the corpse of the once-proud oak tree? And why is it that she leaps forward to lay her horn against the stag's throat instead of pressing her cheek to Danaë’s?
Everything that she is, every terrible lovely, broken piece of her wants to cry then. Even as the stag's knees finally give out, and he sinks down beneath her as if in reverence, it feels as wrong as it does right.
widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
If
she is a garden her unicorn lines are filled with all the holly bushes, and the pear trees, and apples shining and bright as spilt blood, of Eden. Each of her bones is a pillar of smooth stone wall holding all that wonder in until her ribs are convex with the bloating of foliage as it unfurls in a never-ending spring. The veins, her hallways of blood and gore, are nothing more than tracks of rain running through the mossy loam carrying hope instead of sorrow. Her heart twitters like a hundred sparrows and their fledglings as it hurries after the eagle screams of her sister’s heart.
And if she is a garden convex with foliage--
This is the sleek and black-scaled snake running through the boughs of the apple tree. This thrill of her heart is a roar of thunder echoing against the stone walls. This hunger is the rot creeping on the rain-soaked roots as they beg, and beg, and beg, to discover again the procession of the fiery sun. This leap of her form is the sickle curl of the moon as it rises for the very first time, pale as bone and speckled with the reflection of bloody apples, over that worm-bloated and beautiful garden.
She follows her sister, her bloody and feral twin, as another wolf head tucked at the snarl its alpha. Her smile elongates as she spits out her foal caps and bleeds around the teeth of a made unicorn as they bloom in her gums. The curls of her horn stretch in aching inches as she follows the curl of the stag’s ribs as he kneels and trembles before the god of the dark, gloaming forest.
Eden begins to weep in the echoing thunder. Its tears glitter as diamonds and dew in the lighting.
Danaë presses the tip of her horn, now a sword instead of a dagger, deep into the crease between one frail rib and the next. Her tail curls as languidly as that black-scaled snake across the stag’s hocks as she begs them to collapse with his knees. The arcing curl of her tail-blade blooms lines of blood against the sandy fur as she digs it in deep enough to feel tendons vibrate like a harpsichord against her storm.
And when Danaë presses her teeth into her own lips, hard enough to draw blood, she imagines she is biting into the tender skin of a ruby apple instead.
I can feel everything in me growing, and stretching, breaking and reforming itself anew. My lungs, my bones, my tendons, one second they belong to a girl and the next — oh, I am becoming. I run faster, and leap farther, and reach through time itself to fill the cracks my magic has left and —
My horn shatters against the jawbone of the stag.
S
he is breaking when she drives the point of her horn against a thing that knows better than she what it means to live. Even when the hollows of her horn are finally filled and it eases that terrible pit of hunger in her belly, she cannot help but think it makes her more of a monster than she already was. And for as young as she still is, Isolt is so very tired of feeling like a monster.
But for every piece of her that breaks there is her magic, knitting her back together. And for every part of her heart that thinks itself grotesque, or wrong, or a thing-that-should-not-exist, there is her twin’s heart beating to the same tune to let her know she is not alone.
How can a thing be wrong, when she has her sister there to assure her it is their right?
She can feel his blood rushing warm and thick down the curls of her horn like a baptism of death. And she can feel the deer’s life fading as he bleeds out, the same way she can feel her own blossoming like a bloody flower as it does.
As he dies, they are living. Like parasites feeding from a host, every drop of his life-blood bids her to grow faster, and taller, and stronger.
So she does.
She grows. And she grows. And still she grows. And as her horn spirals further and further from her brow and her tail blade whittles itself against a rock into that terrible sickle-moon, she thinks only to the furious magic that made her, yes. Yes, yes, yes.
Like gardens grown in a bitter earth, they grow.
And when she curls her neck over the throat of the deer like a wildcat lording over its trophy, she smiles back at her twin. “I told you,” she whispers to her through a mouth full of blood and bone and broken teeth, “we are faster than mortal things.”
She does not hear the forest weeping around them. But if she did, she would not understand the meaning of it.
widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
In
the deep of her, in the black center, she knows how terrible it is to grow her body from the bloody garden of a stag. She knows how wrong it is to look at his eyes turning to ghosts and pearls and see something ripe for a lily seed. But the wrongness is so very, very deep and far away when she watches her sister sprout and grow to godhood with a mouth full of blood.
And how easy it is to lay her tongue against a rib-bone as if she is only afraid of being left behind as her sister blooms. How easy.
It does not taste like blood, not to her. Danaë closes her eyes and tastes grasses up to her knees in spring, dandelions hiding the fawns from wolves, the musk of an elk as it passes too closely to a bear. On her tongue there is every season, every animal, every dead thing already reaching upward to carry the stag’s body home. She sighs with the taste of life and her body sparks and smolders as it stretches to match the size of her sister.
What Isolt makes dangerous is frail and pearl-shimmering on her body. Instinct has her tail dragging against a bone, a stone, a dead tree, a mouse that was not fast enough. Her horn whispers in the wind without blood filling the hollow of it ( unlike Isolt’s that weeps holy water down her perfect brow). Her joints crack as they fuse together and her neck lengthens and blooms with muscle. When they started, when their godhood slaked it’s thirst with blood, she had thought there would be pain.
But there is only the rejoice of her touch when she draws a bloody kiss down her sister’s eyes. There is only violence when her tail tangles desperately with Isolt’s (as if that deep, deep part of her is begging something to keep her from falling upon the throat of the corpse and feasting). There is only her bloody adoration as she scratches her teeth down her twin’s neck in a gesture that is as much a caress as it is an affirmation.
“You are always right.” And she is, she is, she is.
But Danaë still pulls away to watch with a different sort of rejoice when the first daffodil curls outward from the stag’s pearl eyes like a ray of sunlight bursting free from the clouds. The deep part, the black center that is so full of every color instead of nothingness, sings a hallelujahs when the roots of that same daffodil explode like a star through the remnants of the stag’s heart.
With her mouth full of blood Danaë smiles like a mother instead of a child.
Until the flower wilts and the hour turns, she smiles.
This is the only garden I ever want to nurture: a bouquet of daffodils filling the gaps of a deer who no longer has to fight, seeds falling from the spaces between his teeth. This is all I will ever need.
T
here is a part of her that knows what they are doing is wrong. That part of her that was born of their father's magic, the one that trembles and grows smaller each time she smiles with blood falling from her teeth like tears.
That is the unicorn who stopped when she did not, and whispered against her twin’s cheek we do not have to kill him. We do not have to be the monsters of this story.
And she is not that unicorn.
She is laughing as she feels her bones break and reform themselves, and she is whittling down the curls of her horns into a sharpened edge against the stag’s vertebrae. The feeling of his blood joining with her’s and making her veins swell is euphoric, and she is diving into that pool of magic without stopping to wonder how deep it might take her. And in the blood that coats her throat she is remembering what it is like to live season, after season, after season, even when all she has known herself is winter.
In his blood she is growing, and learning, and remembering a thousand things a unicorn should never have to know. And it is easy, too easy, to give into that part of herself that is always hungry, and always aching, and always wanting for more. She is becoming —
oh, she is blossoming like the corpse flower that only knows how to kill the very things sent to save it. And never does she stop to think there might be something wrong in that, or profane, or anything but her right as a thing born of hunger and seed and magic.
It is only her sister’s touch that can have her turning away from the body of the stag and drawing patterns of love instead of hate across her skin. It is only when her sister tangles their tails together like roots that she thinks to stop drawing lines between the stag’s ribs with her blade. And even when Danaë does not lower herself to feast on the throat of this corpse they’ve made she brushes his blood against her lips anyway, as gently as a moth landing upon a flame.
She sighs against her, when after what feels like an eternity she lifts her body from where it had fallen overtop their kill. Isolt can feel the blood cooling, as the wind makes patterns in the steam that rises from them and chills her shoulders. She presses herself to her sister (who is still so warm, and soft, and alive when the deer is growing colder, and stiffer with every passing second.) And she trembles, when she feels Danaë’s bones shaking and her lungs fluttering and her marrow singing a song only the two of them would know.
She trembles. And she feels, for a second, only mortal. While their immortality rises like a many-headed beast and sets to gnawing at each of her ribs like it is sowing hunger instead of seeds by which she might root, and grow, and blossom. Even while she grows she feels small, like the child she never learned how to be.
But then the magic — the real magic, their magic — starts. And when the first daffodil takes the place of the stag’s eyes and he sighs because he is finally seeing the world for what it is, she forgets all about that other unicorn that she is not.
There is only Isolt, and Danaë, and she will not worry about the things they could have been (or perhaps should have become).
“Will you grow me a magnolia flower?” she asks, when she presses her cheek to her sister’s neck and feels her eyes slipping shut. It is the last thing she wants to see, the one thing she wants to fall asleep thinking of. And she begs those roots reaching for the stag’s heart to grow, and grow, and grow, and never stop.
