Isolde 🦄

(Maidens of Fall Collab) 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔏𝔞𝔰𝔱 𝔘𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔯𝔫 The forest is dying with me. I hear it in the brittle crack of the autumn leaves underfoot, in the soft sigh of branches bowing to the frost. Once, I could have saved it. Once, a touch of my horn would have drawn green from the earth, blossoms from the branch. Now my light flickers like the last ember of a fire, faint, fragile, ready to be carried off by the wind. I am the last. The others are gone, scattered into memory — or perhaps into nothing. Mortals have long since forgotten us. They tell stories of unicorns the way they speak of fallen stars: beautiful, distant, impossible. And when I walk among them in this half-human shape, they do not see me. Or worse, they laugh, call me ghost, trick, dream. But I remember. I remember running beneath the silver moon, my hooves ringing like bells over untouched meadows. I remember my sisters’ laughter echoing through starlit groves. I remember what it was to be endless. Now my hair falls heavy with autumn’s fire, copper streaking the white, and my horn glows no brighter than a breath on glass. With each passing season, I feel more of myself unravel. When the last leaf falls, I think I will fall with it. And yet… I walk on. Through these empty forests, past forgotten shrines, I wander. Perhaps I am waiting for the end. Perhaps I am searching for someone — anyone — who still remembers me. For I would rather fade into a single memory on a trembling tongue than into nothing at all.