Torn Apart

The Last Unicorn

You were doing so well, weren't you? Almost settled for a moment. But you know that scent.

Your bones are sprouting tiny spikes. This is what it feels like, like first time you chased her. Pain eats through every organ and muscle as they rip themselves larger, but most especially in the bones.

You are on your hands and the tips of your toes, tearing down the lower path like an animal. You aren't an animal. Not quite. You could be. Let go a little more.

But you hold on. You want to see her face, watch her scream. This is enjoyable. The pain keeps you hanging onto yourself, even as you shake the cavern with your rage.

Where there was only grief, there is now fear in the air. She is close.

You need no light. You are your own light, green flame wreathing your body as you charge in among the stalagmites. You smell the blood. The old, old blood. The freshly dried blood. The blood mixed with tears and sickness. Mixed with ocean spray.

And there she is, crouched among bloodspattered golden feathers and scarlet plumes. She turns on a heel, her eyes gleaming. Teetering. Ruby flowers wreath her neck and sprout along the creeper vines that tangle between her fingers.

Her hands are full of golden feathers.

You are on her in a breath, your flesh hand gripping her jaw so tight that red trickles from her face. No. You have claws. Your hand isn't looking as much like your hand anymore, and the flames singe her skin.

Rip her face off.

Crisp her until she stops screaming.

Pluck her every feather and throw her from the ceiling.

Tear her throat open.

You are shaking with all the ways you could spill her life onto the rocks around you.

She isn't fighting you. She shuts her eyes, her hands clutching the feathers more tightly.

She doesn't deserve to hold those feathers! You tear them from her fingers, screaming "Murderer!" into her face, though it is more of a roar than a scream.

The smells are all over her now that you are close. All the smells humans expel when they die. Not just Kay dead, no. How else could she leave a prison? And we coaxed her so perfectly.

The blooms at her throat, her victims on the way out of prison. The blooms at her fingertips...

Your eyes drop to your own arms. The vines are so thick around your own arms now, you can hardly see flesh through them, if it is still flesh. You have been there for the fall of every Pepper child. You have been involved. You didn't mean to. You didn't want to.

"Why couldn't you just die?" she choked.

Arthur's eyelids sank shut for a moment, opening slowly. His throat hurt. His bones hurt. Someone was smashing boulders around his brain. He crouched over Aji, who cowered against a rocky outcropping. His hands were his own, and they were full of feathers.

His lungs pressed flat with a wheeze.

"It was supposed to be you," she sobbed. "Just you. Nobody else. Why couldn't you just..."

He pressed the feathers against his face, rocking back to a sitting position. He dragged in deep breaths through the plumage, drawing pieces of himself back together with her scent and the downy touch of Kay's earthly remains. And there was just the sound of Arthur's ragged breathing and Aji's grief.