hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river

She had taken to hiding in the in-between places, the gaps between territories where few bothered to stray. They were the quiet places, the lonely places, the places she belonged to best. She loved the meadow for what it meant to her. It was the place in which she had been born, the place she first knew the love of her mother and her father and her wordless twin. But it was also the place they had each drifted from in turn, parting like stardust in a too-big night sky. She even loved the forest for its lonely trees and hungry shadows, but so did many, and it was the many she tried so desperately to avoid. So she clung to the in-between like the stars clung to the night.

But there was War on the horizon and she had not realized. It seemed strange that a mind-reader would be so out of the loop, but Isle hated falling into someone else’s thoughts. Every time she did there was something dark and sinister waiting to catch her, yearning to hold her under and drown her in the dark. So she suppressed that part of herself, the part that had also belonged to her smiling father. She couldn’t understand how he had sifted through minds which such ease, and now he was gone and there was no way to ask him. Hurt flared like raw heat in her chest and, after a moment, new loneliness joined it.

She had felt the shift of war nearly as soon as it began, she was certain everyone would. Magic crackled like static in the air each time a barrier was erected, like a weatherless storm inching from kingdom to kingdom. She should have known what would happen, should have guessed that her self-control would wither in the face of so many and with such strong emotions bleeding from so many worn, weathered faces. But she was foolish, naïve despite herself and she slipped from mind to mind like a shipwreck crashed against every shore it sought. ‘Stop.’ She begged in a whisper, holding her head low and her ears back as if that would change anything.

It didn’t.
Thoughts of sorrow and loss, of revenge and hatred, of the names of those already lost beat themselves like tattoos against the walls of her aching mind.
Again and again and again.

As if these demons were physical, she ran from them. She bled like shadow through the trees, weaving through the forest until dark gave way to light and she recognized the meadow unfurling like an ocean of green before her. There was a moment, a single heartbeat in time, where her mind acknowledged the impossibly large black stallion perched at the meadows edge. But this fact was buried beneath other thoughts that weren’t hers, dead, dead, dead like the beat of some sinister war-drum.

She brushed past him, barely avoiding a collision as some distant part of her conscious mind stuttered awake. “Oh!” She breathed in the whisper of a broken voice, and she would have kept running if not for the fact that his mind did not unfold itself readily to her. Uncertainty flickered like dying hope in her chest as she stilled beside him, her dark eyes anchored to his face, then tracing the deep lines of scars across his immense body. Even as she counted them, as she followed their curving shapes across the deeper black, she could feel her mind quiet a little. Her chest still heaved with a fear that had settled so deep in the marrow of her bones she wasn’t sure it would ever leave, but impossibly, he had managed to soothe the flayed edges of her mind. Her breath came in short, tremulous huffs as she watched him with uncertainty etched into the soft shadows across her delicate brown face.

“Please,” she says in a voice so quiet, and she isn’t even sure what she’s asking him, “it hurts.”

Isle

hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river

She remains tucked close to his side, but her eyes are closed and her head is bowed beneath the intensity of the thoughts that rush in to replace her own. Dead, murdered. She takes a shaky breath and hardly notices when the edge of her narrow shoulder presses against the black of his side as she leans into him. Oh God, I’m alone. A sound like a mangled whimper escapes the crumble of her chest to fall like ash from her trembling lips. I’ll kill him, I’ll kill them all. She can feel stones piling up in her chest, crushing her bones, her ribs, her heart beneath their cold, impossible weight. The thoughts feel dirty in her mind, like snow so grey it could be ash, and all because they aren’t hers but somehow they fit perfectly within her head. Her jaw clenched tightly, drawing lines along her cheek and beneath her eyes as she pressed her face into the nearest thing. His warm, thick shoulder. The warmth gave her pause and she remembered suddenly where she stood, and with whom, and she pulled away from him reflexively with uncertainty etched into the brilliant dark of her worried eyes.

But when he speaks his voice is not cold and cruel, it is not like the voices of the thoughts swimming in her mind. She stills a little and her face is still uncertain, but it is softer now and she does not continue to drift further from him. We’re burning. She flinches and turns her delicate face from him so he cannot see the way her eyes unfocus and swim with the headache burgeoning inside her skull. When she does look back to him her face is full of shadow and she tucks her chin timidly towards her narrow brown chest. She did not want to tell him anything for fear that if she started she would tell him everything. But she knew it wasn’t fair to have crashed against him in the pit of her fears, to have taken his warmth for her own and expect him to let her stay with no explanation. She floundered a little and new distress blossomed like bruises in the bottoms of her wide, dark eyes. “I-” her voice trembles a little, just a quiet thrum of sound to match the racing thrum of her heart, “the war. I can hear them.” She winces and flinches when she hears herself and the way this confession must make no sense. She exhales sharply and her chest feels like it might cave in beneath the weight of the uncertainty blossoming there. “In my head,” she tries again and she doesn’t meet his eyes this time, “they’re trapped inside my head.” She is already so impossibly small beside him, all delicate bones and narrow angles against his weight and bulk, but she shrinks further still. “I promise I’m not crazy.” She breathes, pulling her lip between the flat of her teeth.

Something occurs to her then, it tickles the back of her mind impatiently until she finally pays it any attention. But as soon as she did, worry painted itself in dark shadow across her delicate brown face. “I can’t-” she stumbles inelegantly over her words, those eyes wider still when they fell against the burning red of his own, “not yours.” Her face softens imploringly as she wills him to understand, to believe her, to not cast her back out into the savage chaos of her unraveling mind. But then her jaw clenches tightly again in a way that shatters any softness that had appeared there in the moments before. “You’re different. I don’t know why.”

Isle

hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river

The silence seems to stretch on and on and it suddenly feels impossible to hold his red gaze for any longer. Her dark eyes part from his, blinking once, twice, and she turns her face instead to trace the brown trees that were no longer bare, no longer stiff and skeletal for the way green life budded along those spindled branches. The branches split the blue of an honest, aching sky and they remind her of the pink, puckered scars etched into the black of this strangers skin. She would’ve turned to look back at him, to trace those marks with the soft of her whiskered lips but something held her back, something uncertain smothered that quiet curiosity. New thoughts, not hers - or maybe they were just old ones trapped by her own toxic fear – echoed inside her mind and she flinched again but said nothing. She imagined she could taste their tears and smell that copper stink of spilled blood, and she couldn’t, not really, but these thoughts made her heart ache all the same. She was a brittle thing, a delicate creature not designed for war or chaos, easily cowed by wrath and cruelty. A shiver races along her spine and she abruptly turns her face back to his, her dark eyes uncertainly soft where they settled against him.

“You’re quiet,” she says, she whispers, and then, “I make you uncomfortable.” It seems a preposterous notion but she feels certain she is right, and if only he knew, if only he knew. But she hates so much to say it aloud, to announce herself because it is always in the way thunder precedes a storm and everyone disappears to take cover. No one liked to know that she was a pit-pocket of thoughts, no one ever believed that she didn’t want their shame and their secrets bleeding into her own. So she doesn’t say it, not yet.

Instead she edges closer with a look of wounded curiosity etched into shadow of her angular dark brown face. With the soft of her white and pink nose she stretches to push aside the tangled ropes of forelock that slip over to conceal the burning red of his eyes. Whatever it is she is searching for in his face she must find, because her expression softens and when she pulls away again there is a not-quite smile ghosting at the corners of her delicate lips. “Different from others.” She says quietly when he finally finds words for her, and that subtle smile sinks a little deeper into the curve of her mouth. Her brow furrows beneath the windswept curls of her black forelock and she cocks her head slightly at him considering. “Some minds leak, or maybe mine does. Maybe I’m what doesn’t work right.” She pauses to chew at her lower lip, turning her face from him so that he might not notice the unwilling, unshared secrets floating in the bottoms of her dark eyes. “But not yours. Yours is different.”

Somehow it feels like she has shared so much with him and the feeling makes her skin crawl with discomfort, but she knows that even now she keeps the most important piece of secret for herself. It seems silly because he has probably already guessed it, but somehow it feels like pulling a knife from her own chest and placing it in his hand when she finally says in a shattered voice, “I am a mindreader.”

Isle

hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river

He touches her, his lips to the curve of her cheek and all at once her heart resumes its hammering in her chest. But it’s different this time because it is not fear that courses like ice through her veins; it is fire. Searing heat like a hundred swallowed suns, and this time when her dark eyes fall on him they are changed. She inhales sharply, a quiet gasp that catches in her throat. When he pushes aside the curls of her forelock just as she had done his, her eyes settle against his like anchors and for a moment she is tethered there. Her brow furrows and hesitation lingers in the quiet of her small, dark face but still she says nothing. She is busy in this instant, this heartbeat in time, busy tracing patterns on a face she had never known before but guessed she would not soon forget. There is something unexpectedly kind waiting for her there in those shadows, something that even now seems to quiet the nerves tangling and untangling like worrying fingers in the pit of her belly.

This scares her.

There have only been a few things in her life that she had hoped to be permanent, but each one of the things had eventually drifted out of reach. Her father had disappeared, ever the wanderer, and with him her twin brother Wyck. Sometimes she wondered if they had gone together, if they were still together, but this notion equally soothed and flayed open her vulnerable heart. She was so like her father, they were both mind readers, and of course Wyck was her other half, but both had left her. Both had gone. Her mother was somewhere, always somewhere in her eternality but Isle felt like she had chosen to spend that eternality with another family. Perhaps in the deepest part of her flayed open soul, Isle blamed her mother for Wyck and Dempsey leaving.

She blamed her mother for loving someone else more.

Isle flinched imperceptibly, her dark eyes flashing with a kind of pain he would not understand if he had noticed at all. It always hurt when her thoughts slipped back to her shattered family, a family that no longer existed. It hurt to remember that her home was wherever the thoughts were quietest, the pit of a lonely forest with no sky above, a place with no family and no friends to betray when their thoughts spilled into hers as soon as she let her guard down.

You cannot read mine. He says and she is pulled instantly from the dark depths of her quiet brooding. She does not answer right away, instead slipping even closer to trace a particularly gruesome scar that sat pink and puckered like a tear in his chest. Her lips find it easily and she outlines its jagged shape, his heart rumbling somewhere below. “Maybe.” She confesses with a frown as she pulls back from his chest, from his heart. “Maybe I could read it.” She is silent again while she struggles to find an explanation for him that would make any sense at all. “It’s like this. If you were to close your eyes, you would still be able to feel the sun on your face, there is still light that bleeds through and illuminates your eyelids.” She pauses to see if he’s following, or if he does finally think she must be losing her mind. “Now imagine you’ve kept your eyes closed for years, and suddenly it’s there all around you and it is brighter than it has ever been before. And you can’t help it, you can’t stop it, you just look. But you know you’ve been tricked even before you see the sun because it is only the dark that waits for you.”

She seems to shrink and crumple and wilt before him, touching her lips to the side of his mouth greedily before pulling away even further because she knows he’ll want her to go now. “I can always feel the pressure of someone’s mind like sun on my face. I think there is an instinctive part of me that wants to look inside, a reflex because this isn’t extra for me. It is me.” Her voices drops away, severed by pain as she remembers the earliest mind she had fallen into, willing at first until she wasn’t anymore. “I try not to look anymore; I don’t want to know these things. But sometimes I can’t stop it.” Her eyes drop to her feet, to the muddied ground below them before she continues. “I think maybe your mind wants to be as alone as mine does.”

She traces the crescent imprint of someone’s hoof in the dirt for a long while before she allows his next words to pull her gaze back to his. Years and years, he says and she finds her eyes drawn back to his scars as she wonders just how many years. Her brow furrows and she aches to slip closer, and even as she wills the same from him there is a fear in her belly that begs him away. It is the fear born of knowing what it means to lose someone you care for too deeply. He speaks again and her dark eyes widen where they land on his face, uncertainty tightening the angles of her dark head. Her voice is the sound of a dozen moth wings, gentle and imploring when she asks, “Will you tell me anyway?” And then even as fear tightens in her gut, dread weeping from the marrow of her delicate bird-bones, “My name is Isle.”

Isle

hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river

She had compared her small world to the sun and he had in turn compared her. Oh, if only she knew. Isle is not light and bright, she is not raw aching beauty, nor is she important in any way. But she does burn. If she is like the sun, then she is a red giant burning everything she can reach, everything that comes too close. She does not mean to, but again and again the world seemed to fracture around her. She was that creeping ghost that everyone dreads, the stranger who knows everything despite being uninvited, who knows every dark secret and ruinous truth. But they never seem to notice how she burns with them, how even she is not impervious to her own destruction. They never notice, and she never lets them.

It is so easy to be lonely, so effortless even as it breaks her.

He reacts to her touch and she does, she does notice the way he tenses when her lips brush the pink scar along his chest. She notices, too, the weight of his warm breath where it settles against her cheek. She notices because she had willed it to be, because with every aching bone in her delicate body, she wanted to believe she could mean something to someone. But even now, even as her heart thrummed in her chest like a trapped bird, something dark and feral twisted unpleasantly in the pit of her stomach.

She knew how much it would hurt when he left her, when he forgot her like most everyone else had.

But he touches her again and even though his eyes had been closed before, they are open now and she feels suddenly dirty with shame for he must be able to see her wretched soul. She had given him everything in that shaky explanation, taken a piece of her heart, of her trust, and dropped it carelessly into his open hands. She balks, starting to pull away until his lips touch the side of her mouth and she is quieted instantly. How was it possible that she had found him like this, a mountain of calm amidst her violent, turbulent storms. How, as she ran and ran with her heart breaking in her chest, had she managed to collide with him.

It was the sound of her heart shattering against her ribs, the rattle of a thousand broken pieces shifting in her flayed open chest, that let her know what had to be done.
You are a broken thing, Isle. You are not meant to be loved by anyone.

She felt her heart turn to dust in her chest when he looked at her, when those burning red eyes traced every angle of her delicate brown face. Selfishly, she drew against him, her small chest pressed to his, their hearts racing together. For a moment she could do nothing more than bury her face against his large, dark shoulder, taste sweat and sun and spring on his skin. But then sluggishly she pulled away, pausing to trace that face again, to remember it always.

“Offspring.” She repeated softly, taking his name like a brand, a piece of burning metal buried deep in her chest. “Don’t stay lonely forever.” She pulls away further and further, her chest tightening as at last she turned from him. “I should go home now.” But she chokes on that word, home, because there was no such thing waiting for her anywhere. Only loneliness, and surely he would know because she had been running wild and afraid and if she’d had a home why wouldn’t she have gone there. “Goodbye Offspring.”

And then when she was far enough away that she didn’t think he could hear her she whispered again, “Please, it hurts.” Except this pain, this hurt was different.

But she wouldn't, couldn't let him burn with her. She could spare him that.

Isle