They rise together.
She gathers her legs beneath herself and rises as he shakes off the slumber of the suffering and she the empathy of one who knows how to bleed rivers and oceans from her veins. The beat of her heart feels as thready as the flutter of air beneath his skin.
“You should not have moved so much.” Her voice rings out like a story beneath the moon glow and starlight, it's full of stories and dreams and constellations.
For a moment she only watches him like a deer might, poised and quivering. Isra wonders if he's the broken conquer or the victim left to rot and freeze when the night comes calling. She wonders until a teardrop of blood rains from his wounds and her fury rises like a comet across the darkness.
There has been to much blood in this world of Novus, too much suffering of mortals.
“Will you let me help you?” Her hooves are whispers across the grass and her breath rises in patterns of heat between the two of them. All her movements drip caution and empathy as she eats the distance between them as fire first devours a forest (slow and full of banked embers that have yet to spark and rage). For a moment it seems as if the world inhales around them and everything feels both great and frozen and almost not quite real.
And then she touches her nose to his (white to black).
The world exhales and the seconds start to rush like a waterfall over them.
“I'm Isra.” Her name echoes like a question and her lips tingle with the crusted antiseptics while bits of ivy still cling to the spaces between her teeth.
ISRA OF THE AFTERMATH ;
our wounds are deeper than truth
