Isra and the sickle smile
“After love, no one is what they were before.”
“After love, no one is what they were before.”
I
sra is not curious about the statues or the crumbled altars that lay broken around them in piles of decay. If she wanted to she could mold them back together, fill in their cracks with pearl and gold and wealth. But she doesn't want to, she wants them to stay broken and crumble to dust. How is a god worthy when their world crumbles and they only look on with apathy as mortals die, burn and starve with rotten food laid out before them like a banquet?They are not Isra's gods, not anymore. Caligo didn't save her city from the flood and from the birds. Warriors and hope saved them. Isra is quickly becoming a tangle of blood-lust and brittle but wild hope. And so she only waits and watches the darkness and thinks of how useless gods are when the world needs them.
Isra will save them, she needs no gods but vengeance and love. I will save us. The thought runs through her like a blade, etching violence in her marrow and hope for salvation in her soul. I know. Fable replies and his eyes blaze like a moon-lit storm sea when he looks at his unicorn and thinks of how she shines in the fading moonlight.
This is the first time that Isra thinks love could be dangerous. She would destroy the world for love-- love of her city, of Eik, of her dragon, of Acton's memory. Love has made a monster of her and maybe that's what the sea intended when it loved her enough to steal her death and remake her.
Love fuels her, makes her braver than she has ever been. Love will be the blade at Raum's throat when she comes for him. He should have kept only her as the target for this rage. He never should have set his gaze on Eik's city.
And oh she will come! Like a shadow in the daytime, like a reaper, like the night she will come. There is not stopping her, not now.
When the fire roars like a lion in the night Isra and Fable both turn their heads towards the altars and the darkness. Something echoes in her at that roar. A tornado groans in her belly and all her bones ache with the force of that churning, wild thing inside her. She smiles, it's not gentle. It's a moon-white slash of teeth across her silhouette.
Isra doesn't join the Seraphina. Fire is not for her nor are gods. She turns and that scythe smile is still on her lips when she starts her journey back down the mountain. Fable prepares to launch into the sky, eager to soothe that sea fury that has been washing over him since he found Isra in the mountain cave.
The night queen still him with a single thought.
Wait for her. Despite whatever it is that she found she's still fresh from battle. Isra turns over her shoulder to look at her dragon. Out-loud she says, “Kill anything that comes for her.” That scythe widens and starts to look like a sickle moon.
Isra looks away and dissolves into the darkness. In her wake dirt turns to steel cut through with the gold and pearl she was unwilling to give the gods. The trail seems to say, Follow me. She needs no invitation to turn her gaze towards Solterra. The tornado in her chest has always known where to turn its dark, deadly gaze.
And just like that Isra becomes war.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: <3 until we meet again
