[AW] the darkness of the dawn;

[Isra]

“And what lies naturally on your lips?” Isra speaks as she walks close enough to touch and the words are ice rivers, winter marshes and ocean-brine that's frozen and falling like snowflakes. She speaks as if she hates the sound of her voice, the way it feels like fire when her breaths and the words upon them blaze against the frozen sadness of her smile. The autumn almost feels like winter when she's knee deep in the rising tides and the rattling of her slave-chain is muffled by waves crashing against the distant cliff-sides. But the winter fades and it feels like summer wildfires singing at her skin when he touches his golden skin to the dark plainness of her neck. His lips feel like a lash, studded and sharp enough to let blood rise like dew drops in the places where the sea meets the sun. Isra quivers, shaking with salted ice-water and the fear that stings at her heart like poisons are rushing through her veins. She smolders. Yet the sea at her back reminds her that once she couldn't drown and the sea resurrected her, coated her in scales and grace. They are in the sea and while he burns like the sun there is no fire in the world that the sea will not drown out in the end. Everything drowns in the end, even the stories in her soul that seem almost pointless and hollow when she gazes back out to the endlessness of the horizon. She wonders if he can feel the smallness of them, the way the tides are coming, coming, coming and they will be helpless to stop them. “The tides have already taken what they will from me.” There's a story in the way the warning falls like shredding, burning pages from between her lips that still tremble from the heat of him. “And soon they will take back the shore.” Isra uses the way the waves are already back to brushing against the scales dusting her belly as an excuse to continue on past the golden stallion, the man who wears skin the same color as her old slave body. Did he feel her tremble and smolder with the fire of his touch, the way he felt like the sun against her winter ocean-skin? The sands at her feet feel like desert quicksand in the rain seasons, endless and deep. The sand sucks at her hooves until she can feel the grit touch her fetlocks as she finally leaves the sea. Her skin feels like less where it's no longer encased in clouds of brine and salt and molecules of water than sting when her pores drink of them. Isra thinks in the wandering dark thoughts of a girl who knows how to bleed at the passions of men. She thinks that even he (this nameless stallion who looks gold, gold, gold) can feel the way the air feels thinner than the sea, brittle as dust to the ivory white-waves that rise, rise, rise both before and behind them. “Come.” She says and it sounds like a thought that has slipped through her pondering, a whisper of a  demand from a girl who  has never had to make one. Who never felt as if she could. “Come away from the sea.” For he is the sun as much as she is the sea and the ocean waves love to swallow golden treasures and hide them down in the deep to rot where no one will ever remember them. * * * * * we rose up to the surface @Thranduil