“and I built my rituals in farewells.”
Fable looks at the stallion and thinks of the sun on the waves of his sea. He always through the color was more golden than yellow, more metallic than matte. It is a color that he has never seen anywhere in the sea, only above it. When he was a baby, in his egg made of pearls and cloaked in barnacles he dreamed sometimes of that color. He dreamed of gold.
So of course he reaches out to brush his nose to the stallion. One of them is salted and briny, the other smells of fresh grass and sadness. Each has something of wonder dancing in their eyes. Fable hums happily as the stallion pulls away. He is a dragon so he doesn't hear the wetness in the stallion's breath or the fluttering shift in her voice.
Isra notices it though. She notices sorrow and sadness like she notices each constellation in the sky. It is that part of her that wants to draw lines between all the pieces of Micheal that dampen his voice and make his legs walk, and walk, and walk until the direction no longer matters.
She would walk with him, if he let her.
But she doesn't tell him not to cry. She doesn't tell him that she wants him to belong to her city on the hill. She doesn't use the words, love or hope. Isra says nothing but, “you are welcome,” because she understands all the things in him that make him tumble out words, like stones running down a mountain.
When he touches her she only smiles, soft and fresh as a heartbreak. “Don't forget.” She's not sure what she's telling him to remember. Maybe it's don't forget that you're mine. Maybe it's Don't forget to find me again. Whatever it is that she's asking him it sounds like a demand instead of a request.
The unicorn and her dragon watch him leave. I like him, Fable says and she replies, As do I.
Fable does not want the stallion to go. Isra understands why he does. They watch until he's nothing more than a distant, golden bloom in the hills. Only then does Fable roar a goodbye.
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