And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
When she had first read about them, curled up in the ferns outside the library, the mountains had seemed like pillars of stone, ice, and nothing else. They had not looked like bones but like earth shaped by eons that she will someday know the taste of. When she had first read about them, the mountains had seemed no more imposing than ink, and poems, and frail leather binding.
But here, in the belly of valleys and ribcage of snow-coated pines, the mountains seem not like pages but like monsters. Each step she takes is through the insides of the earth where they have clawed their way outside like a parasite. And had it not been for the ever-hungry weight of Isolt at her hip, she might have lingered in an eye-cave and asked the mountains what they wanted grown out of their horror and decay.
Instead she does not linger or pause in the eye-cave between rib cages of pines. Instead she slices through the moonlight with her horn and says, by way of their language, with every step, let us feed you sister.
Let us feed you.
Over and again, for miles.
Let us feed you.
Behind them, in that empty place left behind by their shadows, flowers follow. Dahlias bloom in the charred remnants of festering trees. Poppies grow (as bright as her father’s) in the half-moons where their hooves had left wounds in the earth. Roses, white as the bone-color on them both, bloom in each tree, each root, each weed that her sister had rotten. Danaë imagines her garden as new-skin laid over the mountain corpse, a pair of wings by which the bones and the eyes might take flight like hawks and feast, and feast, and feast upon the mortals.
When she lingers at the base of the towering hemlock grove, she thinks that she does not have to imagine for very long afterall. And when she takes the first leaf between her teeth, and looks to Isolt, she does not think but know.
Red is all I can see. It spiderwebs behind my eyes when I close them. It hangs there in place of the moon when I open them. It leads me up the mountains in a trail of bloody poppies when I press my cheek to the red spots on my sister’s hip.
And all of it pulses together like a heartbeat, on and on and on and —
Every flower her sister grows in the midnight soil makes the hunger in her belly growl that much louder.
She presses her jaw against the edge of Danaë’s hip hard enough to stop it from aching (but nothing stops the aching, not for long.) And below it she can feel nothing else, not the feel of the stones turning beneath their hooves, not the dying gasps of the weeds and young trees as they bow to her shadow. There is only the echo of the monsters growling in her stomach, and the way it is as if red is the only color left in the world when she tilts her head back and looks up, up, and up at the mountains curled around them like a fist.
There is a warning in the way they lean in, she thinks. In the way the backs of them are like malnourished spines tearing open the sky.
The points of her own spine is sharp tonight. And Isolt nearly snarls a warning of her own back to the not-monsters that look hungry enough to consume the two unicorns walking into their embrace.
Instead she only swings her tail back and forth like a noose, and with every flower and leaf and trunk that turns to rot in her gaze, she silently begs her sister to grow a garden from. Grow me poppies, Danaë, she does not say, and roses, and dahlias, and marigolds, and morning glories—
She does not say it. But she has never needed to ask, not when their hearts are beating to the same death-knell and the flowers are rising bright and bloody before she has time to ask for them by name.
Her bones are trembling by the time they reach the hemlock grove (but oh! how her heart leaps a little higher at the poison-water flowing through the veins of them.) Later she will say it was the call of the disease-to-be waiting in the leaves that called to her. Or that is was that knowing look in her sister’s eyes, the way she always (always) knew what was best for her, what she needed, before she knew it herself.
Later she will know it was only her selfish magic that whispered to her heart this is what you’ve been looking for.
And if she is surprised at all that leaves feel different than bones between her teeth, she does not show it.
She only crosses her horn with her sister’s so that she can feel the grinding of Danaë’s jaw alongside her own. And when her heart begins to slow and her pupils become wider, and wider, and wilder, and in her chest a rabbit begins to blink itself awake —
the only thank you she knows how to speak is in the way the nightshade at their feet grows twisted and curled, but does not wilt.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Death has always started like this: a tremor of a hummingbird caught in the chambers of heart, a moan in the blood that is more lament than desire, a knell of the stomach when it eats away at poison instead of the soft, pale and sweet flesh of an apple. It leaks into the blood like rain into the soil and knives into a tender spine begging to fold. It leaks, and leaks, and leaks.
The poison has turned to rain sinking into all the seeds, all the rotten wishes, all the frail and tender rabbit hopes of her. The hummingbird in her heart has fallen to the bottom of a ventricle and his wings have started to molt like the skin of a pear left out in sun and storm. And when her wide and wild gaze meets that of her sisters (eye to eye, close enough that she can feel Isolt’s eyelashes weaving into her own) she is glad that the hummingbird has got to rot in the face of the wolf.
This is better. This will always be better.
Somewhere a herd of mountain sheep are rising up on their legs to run, and run, and run through the rock and soil. Their eyes are dark with fairy hills of ash, and soot, and their teeth are bloody with the remnants of icy embers. Danaë wanders in their bellies on her legs of ivy roots and sugarcane. She curls up to slumber in their hearts, her horn another vein by which their soot and blood might run, and course, and gallop onward into a new half-life.
But even in her slumber, even pillowed upon the soft trees of tissue and sinew, she feels no more whole than the soot-eyed sheep. Her own life feels like another half-life, another spine empty and wanting of winter embers.
And so she searches through the livers of the sheep and swings her neck of palms back and forth like a lost lion on a snow-fat mountain. Her hooves of truffles scrape and scramble over the fields of nerve endings wavering in the wind of a starved-for-air lung. Her eyes, wild and wide, are rimmed with dandelion seeds waiting for a wish to carry them away as she searches, and searches for the thing (the exact same thing) as the ewes and the rams she wanders in.
Danaë, and the moss-hearted herd, are always searching.
Tonight, I am becoming. Tonight I am a caterpillar tearing my old skin apart to let the new-me crawl free of my corpse.
But it is not a butterfly spreading her wings for the moon to bless. It is something far more terrible, far more lovely, far more twisted and beautiful and deadly and right, right, right.
It is not the jaw of a unicorn grinding leaves to pulp in her mouth, but a winter-hare. And it is not death she is swallowing down but life, life that makes her heart beat faster and turns her veins into roots that are burning as they dig through the soil of her body.
It is not the sickness she tastes.
It is the honey-sweet pollen coating her lips, her teeth, her tongue, crawling down her throat like spiders where they make webs of rotten leaves and vines in her belly. It is the promise waiting to slip between her ribs and find a home in the graveyard of her lungs.
And it is not a unicorn who rises to run through the veins of those mountain sheep. But she is running through the fairy rings of their eyes, and she is laughing with the voice of a rabbit, and a wolf, and a woodland monster when the creatures fall upon her in the center of it. They are dancing there, in the fairy ring-eyes of the ewes, pulling her along with them until she sinks deeper, and deeper, and deeper into them.
She looks down and sees blue ash making molehills and forests. She looks up and sees the insides of their eyes, blooming with larkspur and monkshood. The mountain valley is awash in the colors of their irises, like the fluid filling their eyes has spilled out into the world and she has been swept along on its current running down their cheeks.
You’re going mad they whisper to her, with their teeth drawing rivers of blood upon her skin that draw the rest of them to her like flies to a corpse. They claw at her, dig the spaces between her ribs deeper and deeper until she can feel them filling up her chest and gnawing at every organ rotting there.
And she only laughs all the louder, all the wilder. And when she turns to her sister and tries to ask her, “what is a unicorn if she is not a little mad?” all that comes out of her mouth is the barking scream of a fox.
So she screams. She screams and she screams until all those mountain sheep are running, and somewhere she knows her sister is running through the bellies of them. Somewhere she is aware that there are dandelion seeds carrying her sister’s wishes, and sorrows, and dreams through lungs like foxtails waiting to embed themselves into flesh.
But Isolt is dancing in their eyes with the fairies.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Even here, on her truffle hooves and birch-bark legs, curled in the belly of a mountain ewe, she does not know how to become a thing sharp enough to sink between the rib-cage bones of this cage. This deep in the herd she can hear her sister spinning round like a snake in the eyes. She can hear the whisper of her horn as it tries to cleave this new world in which they run into a million pieces instead of two.
A forest of nightshade, or a sea of it, could not tame every drop of eternity she can feel pressed against her outside (where she is not in the herd but rather the unicorn that the herd is in.).
Her heart is a fractal of light painted on a frosted window when she tries to rise like bile from the stomach, to the lungs, to the mandible, to the eye where her sister is waiting. It waivers in the moonlight, and the sunlight, and the starlight. It waivers, and reflects, and refracts, until even her heart becomes light in her fern chest instead of organ.
And each light, each fractal arrow, races from her chest in search of Isolt.
She is running on the fletchings of them and each leg is a feather caught on the same breeze that fluttered in a butterfly flock through the ram’s lungs. Her horn is the point of the arrow, ruby and gestalt melded down to a point shaper than diamond. Each bone in her body welds itself down into the grain-wood and smooth hunger upon which the fletching sings. But even as an arrow she does not know how to become sharp enough to sink into flesh and sinew.
Even as an arrow she only presses a kiss into Isolt when she screams like a fox. It is the only war she knows how to fight and lilacs bloom in her own eyes when she tries to sink into the fairy eyes of the sheep.
Danaë does not know how to sink in, how to run in the ash and fill up the cracks of her teeth with the bruise-blue of soot. Her teeth scrape on the knotted eye of a pine tree leaning down to press snow into her spine as it bows low, low, low as a rising moon. The flavor of soot, and life, and wood half-rotten, settles on her tongue. It burrows in like a worm until she can feel lichen curling upwards to the fractal sun, and moon, and stars on the roof of her mouth.
She opens her mouth so that Isolt might pull all the constellations out of her and cast them into the cosmic darkness waiting in her belly.
I did not know that this is what I have been searching for. I did not know that there could be so much sweetness in life. I did not know that I could dance in a fairy garden and sow seeds instead of rot.
I did not know —
but my sister has showed me the way.
If there was ever a world in which Isolt belonged, it was this: the forest of night shade her sister presses against her lips and begs her to eat, and eat, and eat. And now she finds that those leaves settled in her belly between the magic and the rage like there has always been a place there waiting just for them. Every part of her feels alive when they sink to the bottom of her like their poison is only seeds, and she the garden soil for them to sprout, and root, and bloom in.
And oh, Isolt has never wished to be a garden for anything more than she wishes to be it now for the nightshade.
One day she will be that garden, and she knows she will be more lovely, and more terrible a garden than any others before her. The feel of the nightshade still tingling on her lips is promise enough of that, and the laughter of the fairies the proof of it.
But it is the kiss of her sister that has her dancing free of the fairy eyes of the mountain rams, and blinking up at the midnight sky as if for the first time.
She can feel her flower-petal heart trembling, and her ivy-wrapped lungs gasping in the crisp night air. And when her twin scrapes her teeth down the uneven bark of a tree she swears that she can taste the pine of it, and the needles, and the sap filling her teeth. It ferments on her tongue like the honey-wine of the earth. And Isolt is drinking it down with the same hunger by which she ate of the leaves.
She feels more like a humming bird than a fox then, as she flits to her sister's side and looks down her throat like she is looking into the heart of a flower. This time Isolt does not try to tell her that she can see those constellations that all choking her, or ask her it they hurt (a hummingbird does not think to ask the flower if the nectar is for her or for another.)
She only takes a lock of Danaë’s mane between her teeth, and she pulls —
and she pulls —
and she does not stop until they are swimming together in the galaxies she has freed.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
A sea of darkness and stars brushes against her belly and laps in waves around her muzzle as she dips it down into the water. Each star, as she swallows them back down, sits in her belly like a wish. Her pine-tongue and lichen throat shimmers with the brightness of a moon and when her sister pulls her loose from the sea the glow follows her.
In the moonlight, with the moonlight on her tongue, she feels like a bit of stone turned to molten embers and silver begging to be forged into a blade. All her arrow-bones, and her birch-legs, stumble as she tries to keep up with the comet Isolt has become. The sea of darkness and stars follows behind like a tide caught in the moon gravity of them.
Somewhere, where she is a unicorn still enthralled with the stark violence of the mountains, knows that someday the entire world will catch and snare in the gravity of them.
But tonight they are moonlight and when she runs and swims, her mane caught between Isolt’s teeth and their rib cages snarled together like roots, she does not spare a thought for the violence of the mountains. All her thoughts are too full with stars, and fairies, and ewes curled up like snakes. Her tongue is too fat with the taste of pinesap and bitter lichen to taste the sea water, or the wishes in her belly, or the ichor of the fairies. Each galloping step takes her deep into the flavor and into the stars.
And Danaë, as she feels the leaves where they’ve tangled with the sea, does not ask Isolt where they are swimming to. She follows in the same way she will always follow Isolt: with the desperation of soft thing trying to learn how to be sharp, and dangerous, and deserving of all the death tangled up with her life.
Even when the nightshade runs out in her blood, and the stars and darkness leak out as sweat from her pores, she follows.
My sister has always made me feel softer. When she presses her cheek to mine and shushes me to sleep, when we gallop together in our dreams. In the rest of the world I am breaking, each fractured piece of me whittling down into knives and spears and blades.
But here in the galaxy we swim through together, I am finally content.
Some things, Isolt knew, were made only to take into the grave.
Most days she is looking for those things. The last prayer on the lips of a sinner-turned-saint, before the sickness in their lungs drowns them. The hope of a dying mother for her children. The quivering instinct of a field mouse to run, run, run the instant before the owl descends upon it. Isolt is there — always, she is there — for that last wish to tuck between their teeth like clover before laying them into their graves.
But today it was her turn. Only it was not clover pressed to her lips, but nightshade. And it was not death her sister was leading her to, but a dream.
Danaë is trying to become sharp but oh, Isolt would tear the world down to its bones to keep her soft (she would do almost as much to become soft herself. But only almost.)
Tonight she is as light as moonlight as she dances and swims and runs through the marrow of another world, like blood inside a bone. She holds tight to her sister’s mane between her teeth (because to let go was to drift away, to lose her in all that space of the galaxy around them. And that is not a thing Isolt could bear.) In the spaces between each of her ribs are those of her twin’s, as though they are not two bodies but one — and this, this settles a piece of her that had been torn free since the moment her legs were untangled from her sister’s at their birth.
With their hips and shoulders and necks tucked together, Isolt can taste daisies between her teeth instead of gore. She runs on birch-legs with flower-lungs that are blooming instead of wilting. With each breath she feels their petals fluttering in the wind she makes. With each step she feels them going to seed, and rooting, and rising. So she runs, and runs, and runs; she runs as if the sun will never rise, as if the nightshade will never run out, as if the galaxy where they are the brightest stars orbiting each other will never collapse.
She runs until her waking-dream becomes one of sleep, tangled leg-to-leg and horn-to-horn with her sister. And this is the only thing that can bring her peace.
