[private] family is who you set fires with

[Isotope]

fire in my lungs, can't bite the devil on my tongue. (i don't need to be loved by you.) The forest is not the ideal location for most to have an encounter with the dragon child. The shadows – her grandmother’s coveted shadows – are unkind.  The shadows strip her bare in the most literal sense.  Flesh peels from bone, sloughing away in a mess of skin and scales and decay.   She is drawn to them. To the burning shapes in a sea of cold. The burning colors dance through the trees.  Her pace quickens as she weaves through the trees – desperate to join them.   “Who…?” She says, perhaps too loudly, as she steps towards them.  There’s no hesitation in her steps as she makes her way towards one, not a single ounce of reservation or shame.  She’s never seen herself, nor would she ever. She doesn’t know how her flesh drips from her bones in the shadows, how decay is the plague passed on to her from her mother.  Her blindness is something inherited from her father – with horns sprouting from her sockets just as his had done.  The horns are still small, but they glow with the same intensity as her mother’s eerie eyes.   But the four figures burn so brightly in her vision – beckoning her out from the shadows.  Calling her to them. She doesn’t turn away or flee into the darkness.  Already, she’s discovered loneliness leaves an awful taste in her mouth.  Unlucky for one like Isotope, to be so cursed yet to have such wants.   “Family.” It is not a question, it is a statement. And she does not ask to be included.  She simply demands.  She’s been denied a family since the moment she’d awoken on the Pangean border alone with nothing but a name ringing in her ears.   She will not be excluded any longer. i s o t o p e .

well. this unimaginable weirdo has arrived.