isolt griffin

I'm more alive than I've ever been

Isolt knows in a starkly painful and wholly unavoidable way that her untimely demise had been nearly entirely a product of her own follies. Even as she imparts the sinister tale unto her dearest companion, she is reminded of the parade of wrongdoings that had been committed by her hand in those innocent and crucial moments before Risque had taken her from the mortal realm forevermore. She had allowed youthful ignorance and reckless trust placed in a stranger to lead her so very far astray.

And she had paid dearly for her missteps.

"I know, I KNOW," she insists, the tinge of regret undeniable as Isolt's hands rise to her gossamer locks, fists tightening about the crimson ribbons in a display of abject self-resentment. She concedes to the weighty silence for a time, the supple plane of her forehead resting against her folded knees in a gesture that could be naught other than defeat. "I know that," she offers finally, raising her head, her voice scarcely more than a whisper. "Trust me, I go over it in my head at least once every day, and I dream about it all the time." It is both a simple and momentous truth, a barbed and jagged pill forced down her gullet every time that the recollection surfaced from the glistening black lake of Isolt's memory.

But, for Harley, she finds that she is willing to once again hold up a mirror to her misguided adventuring on that fateful eve, if for no other reason than to assure the dark-haired woman that she had not been abandoned. That she had never once been forgotten or betrayed. Isolt's greatest regret of the many that plagued her had been and always would be that she had not returned home to Harley, that her eldest and dearest friend had been forced to walk the avenues of life without her at her side. For this and so many other reasons do the tightly-held tears draw their hideous crimson lines down the pallor of Isolt's cheeks. Though as she moves to wipe them away, the apology almost automatic as it graces her lips, the redheaded vampire is taken aback by the gesture of her friend. So aware are both women of Harley's hatred of the undead that even this presumably simple motion is momentous in its own right, Isolt all but frozen in the moments that her friend's finger brushes lightly against her cheek.

"She's never going to get me... not all of me, anyway," she asserts, this singular truth having always been so. Risque may have preyed upon Isolt when she was little more than flesh and blood; however, with the taking of life, the devil's maiden had imparted upon Isolt a strength that was nothing if not entirely otherwordly. She had woven steel not just into the muscles of her progeny, but into her resolve... into her soul. Blood may bind them in this afterlife, but they were no more similar than they had ever been. And she would welcome the truest death with the open arms of a distanced lover before Isolt might allow herself to morph into Risque's nefarious mirror.

Harley's next query sees Isolt pause, the dazzling cerulean of her eyes drifting for a moment at the recollection of the night that she had been freed... only to discover how very alone she had become. "He helped me. One night we just... forced our way out," her eyes lift to meet those of her companion yet again, the barest suggestion of a grin tugging upon cherried lips. "And then we burnt her palace to the ground." The memory of the wall of flames as it dispersed and devoured Risque's crown jewel would forever know life within the memory of the redheaded vampire. Fire, after all, was cleansing. At least that was the fable they seemed content to tell themselves.

"Yes, Damon is vampire," she says, hardly able to stiffle the remnants of a chuckle as they glaze her words, "but he's not like her, Harley. He's not one of them. I promise. He saved me when Risque was trying so hard to break me... he taught me what it was to be vampire." It is a meager explanation of the full breadth of what her lover had truly done for her in those early days and what he had continued to do every day since. But that tale was to be saved for another time; a time when, perhaps, Harley would be better able to accept the details and maybe, just maybe, allow them to more adequately flesh out her feelings towards the elder vampire with whom her friend had fallen so hopelessly in love. For now, there was a single query that burned brightly amidst the glistening embers of all of the others within Isolt's mind. Something that had never truly faded from her mind in all of the years that the two women had been apart from one another. "Harley, what happened to you back then? Where did you go?"