It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
Last night they (for they are always a they) had lingered in the castle after the moon fell instead of in the garden. The old castle-keeper had promised a story by the rolling inferno of a fire in the library and Danaë, who often listened to him tell her how to grow a garden instead of kill it, had settled down eagerly to hear the tale of the monster in the woods that came before mother.
Once there were more monsters in the woods than horses, back when the trails were thick with vine instead of pathways worn down by the careless mortals. Here she had given him a look, as if to say you are a mortal old man, but he quieted her with that strange look of otherness that quelled her where mortals never could.
The castle-keeper carried on.
In the darkest part of the wood there lived the Bramblebears. Years ago they lived not as solitary bears do but in a pack and when they hunted the entire forest took up singing a knell for anything they set their hunger at. Nothing survived their hunger when it roused to a fever pitch when the winter faded. There had been more to the story of course, but Danaë had stopped listening there: the entire forest took up singing
The entire forest took up singing.
It is the song she’s looking for when she strays from the mortal-path, to the stag-path, to the wolf-path, to the nothing-path. She’s listening for it when the willow turns to oak, the oak to pine, and the pine to knotted winter-dead trees she has no name for. In the silence she listens for the weeping of the pine and the lament of the rabbits-- for any hint of the song that echoes in her bones: a knell, a death knell, over and over again until she’s started to wonder if it’s the only song her blood will ever sing.
When the first note of the song echoes in her blood, a sonnet of blood and bones begging for root and vine, she’s looking to her sister for direction. Isolt has always been the one made for the hunt. She knows she’s made for whatever happens after they’ve laid their teeth at a tender throat and drank. Her magic, her life, comes quickly on the heels of death or it comes not at all. And she’s waiting for death (for Isolt) to lead her to the life where the song is telling them to go.
Hurry, her blood is telling her in a voice that sounds so very like the castle-keeper, the pack has slumbered for long enough..
I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins.
I cannot hear the song that my sister is looking for.
I cannot hear anything besides the sound of both our hearts beating at once, and the way we make every bone and rotten branch in the forest cry out in response.
I
solt is not listening to the castle-keeper’s story that night.
She is braiding dead leaves and the bones from a sparrow she had caught into her sister’s mane, and in her mind a bramblebear is running through the heart of the Court. In her mind she is imagining all the ways another monster from the woods might teach the people of this city what it feels like to be hungry. And the story that runs through her dreams that night is far more feral, and violent, and terrible than any the castle-keeper might have imagined.
And when she wakes up trembling beside her sister, it is not from fear.
It is — as it always is — from hunger.
The forest grows darker and darker the further into it they go, like a beast swallowing them bit by terrible bit. And what little light is left crawls down the hollows of her horn and sits there like another disease, making every shadow of it deeper and every line sharper, and hungrier. And her wanting hangs there with it like a weight, until her head bows low, low, low enough to guide herself through the forest with it, wielding it like a warning to all the wild creatures that know to hide when they see the two unicorns coming. Beside her her twin is still searching, and listening, and tracking down legends like a hound following a blood trail.
Every time Danaë pauses to listen Isolt stops beside her, and presses her ear to her ribcage like she is hoping to hear the song echoing inside of her. And that is how they enter the belly of the beast together.
At first it does not feel any different than the forest they have already passed through.
The trees are still silent, turning their faces away from the two unicorns as they pass. The wind is suddenly still, as though the world has lost its breath. Beneath her hooves the ground groans, as the undergrowth bows its head and dons the crown of rot that she offers.
But there is this, too: the sudden turning over of bones in their graves, a trembling so thin and subtle another unicorn (a true unicorn) might have missed it.
Isolt misses nothing.
She does not tell her sister that she has found the trail, not in words. She only pricks her ears and lowers her head like a wolf, and with only a look she says follow me. Her heartbeat turns to chanting inside of her chest, the sound of ancient packs coming together again for one final hunt. It leads her on, as the darkness turns malevolent with old hungers that had never been satiated.
The forest is no longer silent around them. And the shadows do not sit so. quietly beneath the trees, but press in closer, and closer, and closer.
All of them are purring, and hungry, and terribly awake.
And Isolt almost does not notice the way the bones beneath the earth are arranged in a sickle moon that leads them in deeper, and deeper, and deeper until they are surrounded by the trembling earth.
It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
What death a unicorn sees is not, in the black essence of it, the same sorrowful dirge the rest of the world sees in sonnets of sorrows. The death of unicorns’ is a bright thing, a rosebud thing, a pale sickle moon of a thing. Danaë does not see the black silence of the forest where trees bend backward like spines shaped into mountains instead of tombs. She does not see the gloaming and dappled moonlight, she only sees silver shards pointing towards the heart of the forest like pillars of a church she has always prayed in.
Each time Isolt presses an ear to her ribcage that trapped heart stumbles, and stutters, and grows bright as a moon in the midnight. Danaë, if asked, would gladly tear her own insides out to give Isolt whatever is it she is looking for.
And deep down, where she is a heart like Ipomoea’s and nothing else, she knows that someday it might come to that.
But tonight her sister is pulling away before Danaë can tear herself asunder because the earth has started speaking in the language of hunters instead of the song of the bones. It trembles in currents of loam shifting over the river-bed of skulls, and tibias, and jaw-bones shattered around granite. Each tremble feels like a knife cutting into her skin, over and over again, because it wants magic and not unicorns. Her steps falter and her knees feel like spores and roots in her legs instead of bones. And she knows, when she taps wait, wait, wait against her sister’s hip that all the unicorn things in her belong to something else, something so much stranger than the dreamer's face she looks at each morning in the pond.
A head is the first time to rise from the trembling earth. Danae can see the weeds lolling like a tongue between the char-teeth when the jaw opens towards them in a silent snarl. Her stuttering heart takes up the sound of that snarl, and that silent clicking jaw, until the bramblebear’s spine rises from the dirt upon its bed of ribs. And there, in the middle of the dirty bones, a yellow spore blooms bright as a forgotten sun.
She does not ask her twin to help; she knows she does not need to say the words.
Wisteria blooms where eyes had once been. Holly shapes itself into a liver and raspberries into a spleen. A paw woven together with tradescantia dapples the chewed-up dirt when the risen bear moves towards them. Danaë still can hear the roar in her heart when she steps close enough to the bear to lay her cheek to the shoulder stitched together with clematis.
Perhaps that’s why, when she lifts her head into the gloaming darkness that scream that comes out is more bear than unicorn, more roar than sorrowful song. And together, the bear and the unicorn that would gladly tear out her heart, look towards Isolt like she’s god instead of sister.
Command us how to hunt, their look in the singing forest says, we are starved.
I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins.
If the forest is singing I cannot hear it over the sound of its hunger. I cannot hear it over the growl of my own stomach, or the snarling of my sister's heart, or the clacking of our monster's jaws.
But I think that the sound of all those things together is more of a poem than any I might find in a book. This is the only story I ever want to write.
E
ach whisper of a flower-petal eye gathers in the hollow spaces between her ribs until she feels more like a bramblebear waking up after a long winter. Isolt remembers what it felt like to lay in the ground for all those years. Through the freezing and the thawing, the wilting and the blooming, the dying and the being reborn. Deep in her veins where she is bleeding rot instead of blood, she remembers.
And when she blinks she can imagine she has wisteria for eyelids instead of skin, and there is a moment in which all she sees is her bones blooming in a thousand shades of lavender-blue being stitched together.
And those eyes — those terrible, lovely, empty eyes — blink back at her.
Danaë does not need to ask her to help. The moment the ground begins to tremble she is pressing her shoulder to her twins so hard she wonders how she doesn’t break their skin and fall into her (but oh! how she wishes she did.) When the first head rises from the trembling earth with soil falling between its bared teeth her own lips peel back into a silent snarl. She can taste the forest loam between his teeth (their teeth). She can feel his jaw (their jaws) snapping through roots and rocks to break itself free.
Her bones are trembling like it is her own body that she is growing roots, and vines, and wisteria through. Like it is her own soul her magic is tightening around like a noose.
Isolt lifts her head to the gloaming darkness that is still echoing with her twin's roar. And to the hungry shadows that are whispering of famine and hunts —
she smiles.
Her heart stutters to take up the beat of the golden pollen seed shining between the ribs of their monster. She does not need to ask Danaë it she can hear the song in it, or the sound of the forest remembering how to sing its death knell like it had never paused to rest. It is there in her bloody gaze when bear and sister turn to look at her with every seed of ancient hunger caught between their teeth.
And the look in her eyes that is more creation than unicorn, more god than sister, says yes, yes, I will teach you how to hunt.
Isolt joins them. She presses her shoulder to the bramblebear's and feels his song resonating in the marrow of her bones. And she pauses only long enough to look at her sister from in between his ribs. Ivy drapes across her shooters like a robe, spiderwort tingling in her mane (and everything grows specks of mold, decay eating holes into the paper - thin leaves, in all the places where it touches her skin.)
All of them step forward together. All of the forest trembles at that first step.
Another step, one that feels like remembering how to run. Their bones are aching. Their joints are straining against the roots wiring them together. Their vines nearly tear.
Again they step, and again they hold themselves together. Again, and again, and again while the forest sings and the darkness snarls and the mouth held together with wild flowers begins to laugh through a mouthful of jagged and broken teeth.
And by the time her belly begins to hum they are running.
It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
They are running in a melody they have not spoken for so long. Each claw is a chorus, each whisper of root trailing from their teeth a tune. When their jaws clack, and their bellies snarl instead of gurgle, the sound is not discordant but harmonic. The forest bows around their sound and each bough is a throat echoing their notes up into the mouth of the moon. An owl flies overhead, a whisper of sound instead of a bellow of it, and even that is nothing more than the hush, hush, hush of pages full with notes rubbing together like cricket wings.
We are running. We are running. We. Are. Running. The moonlight is iron and ice on our tongue. Beneath our paws the dirt dimples and trembles like flesh caught in a hungry smile. Each stride is longer than the last, each jump more full of violence and wrath than the last. If the forest is moving around us it is only to fall to its knees and bow its head before the return of us. And if the forest is making a sound of rejoice is it only the sigh of a blade sinking into a rusted door on the eve of war.
Before them, around them, through them, the trail of a mountain lion blooms quick as a root of thistle weed. It is thick with the copper tang of hare blood, and vole blood, and flesh caught between teeth that has started to fester. They drop their noses to the trail, like hounds trained instead of risen forest-gods, and their run turns to a weaving, infinity pattern through the trees. Over and over they loop: chase and retreat, chase and retreat. The thrill of it, the distant roar of that hunted lion, is enough of a gift that they do not want to rush it.
Our hunger-- no, not hunger-- our starvation feels like the press of a million thorns into our holly liver and our raspberry spleen. The spore in the center of our chest feels like a sun instead of a flower, a nebula around which every constellation of us flickers. The bowing forest turns from rejoice and settles into prayer. We can hear rabbits whispering a prayer of "not I" to each sparrow bleating "not I" to each fox curling around their kits begging "not us, not us, not us". But we are them too, all of them, where our roots bleed into their dens, and nests, and holes dug in the thicket. We tell them all, as we run after that mountain lion, "not you, tonight is not for you."
They do not relent as they follow the blood trail into the dark-soul of the weeping forest.
All three of them do not relent. They cannot relent. They will not relent.
We are starved, and desperate, and as empty as a hole void of color and life.
I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins.
I am running with claws digging into the forest loam instead of hooves. And I am searching the shadows with daisy-eyes instead of rubies, as seeds fall from between my teeth and I clack my jaws together because I need more than roots to fill them.
I am not a unicorn tonight. I am risen.
S
lipping into the hunt is as easy as slipping into hunger, and violence, and the shadows that are all too hungry to receive her. And slipping into the hunt with her shoulder pressed to their risen monster, and his other shoulder pressed to her twin’s, comes as naturally as the rot that spreads out in patterns that echo flowers in each half-moon of her steps.
There is no space left between them. There is no difference between the unicorn’s inhale and the bramblebear’s exhale. There is no difference—
they are One when they step into the forest and smile a terrible, three-headed smile with rot and seeds and petals falling from each of their teeth. If Isolt had thought she knew hunger before it is nothing compared to the famine roaring out in pain in the belly of the monster panting between their shoulders (no, not between them — with them, his breath fetid and burning in her own lungs.)
If it was her hunger and her hunger alone there would be nothing to stop her from turning to the blood-trail and dragging every rabbit, and sparrow, and fox kit from their dens with claw and fang. There would be nothing to stop her from filling her hunger on every wood-mouse and blood-root, and bathing herself in the mess their hearts make when she cuts them open. But her hunger is not her own tonight.
And tonight she does not relent. Tonight there is no difference between unicorn and god and sister and risen and monster. Tonight she is listening to the sun-pollen spore of her heart as it begs her this one, this one, only this one. All around the forest is echoing with the songs of ancient-hungers and age-old-hunts and monsters-that-should-not-have-been-disturbed. And the sound of it is a thrill they takes between their teeth and pull.
The hunting is as joyous as the killing. So they hunt, and they run, and they track, and each step that edges them closer to the mountain lion at the end of the trail is another seed cracking between their teeth.
Ahead Isolt can hear the snarl of the mountain lion (can feel the earth shuddering as the blood of another rabbit drenches it). And it is not her voice that snarls back at it, but the voice of a risen thing echoing in three throats. Together their rage tells the lion that one was not your's to take.
And they will make it pay for it in the only way they know how: a life for a life, sating their hunger with the flesh of another hungry beast.
It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
The hunt feeds them, nourishes them like dioxide, waters their desert-leaves with the promise of spring-blood. It flashes through their hearts and their veins like a comet dying out too quickly in the atmosphere. There is no wish in their bellies, no long-dead constellation story, there is only want and need.
They hunt not because they must. It would be enough to rend the forest apart and feast on all those whispering “not I, not I, not I”. It would be enough to fill their evergreen stomach with vole, and fox, and hare until the forest was as watered as their need.
We do not hunt because we must. We hunt for the quiver in our pollen blood when the mountain lion snarls and bares her teeth at us. We hunt for the rejoice in our evergreen berries as they promise water to the desert-leaves covering our pines. We hunt. We hunt. We hunt not for the aftermath of it but for the violence in it.
The lion is baring her teeth at us now and we can see each drop of bloody spit hitting the bare-bough trees when she steps to meet us. Her snarl is a mere distant storm to the consuming hurricane winds of us. We could carry her hunger in the single hollow curl of a single one of our claws.
And we will carry her in our hollies, and raspberries, and evergreens.
Together they step towards the snarling lion and they count each festering bit of flesh hanging from her teeth. They count each torn out joint scattered around her like petals in the autumn. They want to tell her, you are sick, sick, sick but their mouth does not know how to make any sound but death and wrath. The blood dapples the fur and moss of their paw as they drag a warning into the earth like all the cuts they will drag across her ribcage. When they roar the sound is a eulogy instead of a roar.
When we roar the trees shiver on the mantle of their god. The sound feeds us almost as much as the feast will. But when we leap at the lion as she leaps at us….
And when we latch our teeth on her throat and pull…
When we start to eat her the trees do not shiver. They sing.
I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins.
Perhaps in some buried part of me, I can remember parts of the story the castle-keeper had told us. Perhaps deep down in my bones I am listening again to the rage he told us about, of the buried hungers, of the violence the mortals of this court tried to destroy.
I think maybe I can hear the song of it now. And it is the only song I wish to listen to, like a war song in place of the cradle lulling me into dreams of blood.
T
he bramblebear’s hunger becomes her own. It drowns out every bit of the aching she had known before, hollows out a stomach she had already thought empty (but now, oh now she knows there was still more for it to feed from.)
And she can feel her sister’s hunger just on the other side of that bony scapula she presses her shoulder to, running in all the same discordant notes as her own. She can feel it echoing down in her bones, twisting around her hunger, around the bramblebear’s, around the song of the forest, until all of it is so woven she cannot tell one from the other. It is better this way, she thinks as they move as one through the midnight forest. It is better that they should not be able to tell one from the other. That they should press themselves together so tightly the difference between them is made obsolete, that they should become one.
And one they become.
They snarl together, three mouths attached to one body, to one soul, to one mind. They rake through paw through the loamy earth and scratch the dirt as a warning to the mountain lion. Together their twin tails whistle through the night air, carving lines into trees, into their own skin, into their raspberry chests — it does not matter which. They feel all of it and none of it, as their pollen-spore heart glows all the brighter like a sun between their rotting ribs.
Like a sun, they will consume. Like a sun, they will destroy everything in their path. Like a sun, they will become the gods of this forest.
So they lunge. And they crack bones between their jaw. And they swallow down the blood and the flesh and the life of a thing that had gone too long without seeing the rightful god of the forest that it had begun to believe she was the god. And oh, how right it is that they teach her otherwise, how good it is to awaken all the ancient stories and buried hungers that this world had foolishly forgotten, had naively thought itself safe from.
Somewhere, Isolt can feel her bones growing weary. Somewhere she is still herself, and slipping further and further away from the magic knitting them all together like stitches in an open wound. Somewhere she is falling asleep to dreams of blood and hunger.
But with her magic still twisted in the chest of the bramblebear with her twin’s, she feasts. She feasts until the darkness consumes her.
It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
Blood, and meat, and marrow, tastes different than they remember it tasting. Each swallow is filled with as much gore as it is marrow. Their teeth do not worry at the bones as they once did an eon ago when the gods walked on young and childish legs. Instead they tear through the mountain lion with an ease that bone teeth could not. Each thorn in their jaw, each vine woven together to make their tongue, each carnivorous plant hanging down from the roof of their mouth consumes the predator like she had been nothing but a copse of newborn oak instead of a corpse gone cold.
We do not notice when the singing of the trees turns loud enough to deafen. Our entire being, down to the sun-hot spore in our chest, only hears the serenade of death, of rejoice, of each fox and vole and hare as they sing hallelujah for the culmination of our violence. All we can hear as the lion turns to nothing more than shreds of live strewn in the autumn leaves and chewed up rot, is how the singing turns to a hum.
All we can hear is how it echoes in our hearts. And echoes, and echoes, until even that sound turns dull as the hallelujah of the animals turned to slumber. We had forgotten the silence of the aftermath, the quiet part of war, the way even our stomach makes no sound as the hollies and evergreens turn marrow to water.
In that silent aftermath we sleep.
And with the bramblebear return to seed, and a vine belly full of blood that sinks back into the earth, Danaë curls up with her sister in the middle of the gore and sleeps.
