Isra and her dark thoughts

Isra is waiting, and waiting, and waiting. But for the first time it doesn't feel like she's waiting for war, or for the fury growing in vines along her bones to rip through the surface of her. It only feels like she's waiting to figure out what will be left of her after the end of Raum. Or maybe she's only thinking about what will be left when the two stars growing into constellations of flesh and bone in her womb fall to earth.

Either way Isra is waiting beneath the shaded curl of her dragon's wing at the edge of the Steppe. A herd of elk is watching them warily from the distant thicket, and Isra wonders if it's Fable they're worried about or the magic in her veins whispering things like become and change at them like small tremors of the earth. She's trying not to think about them too much when Morrighan appears across the horizon.

Isra trots to meet her. The smile of her face almost waivers when she feels the way her skin stretches wrongly over her belly, or the way all her bones feel full of rust instead of marrow. She blinks and begs a little of her fury and fire to return.

It works.

The quiver and bow slung across her shoulder start to glow. Strange patterns of light move across the curl of neck when she pauses only long enough to make a move to brush their noses together. “I'm glad you did.” She says in a whisper too soft for a battlefield before she pulls away and starts to trot in a lazy dragon sized circle around Morrighan. Each step comes easier than the last and soon her body feels alive with adrenaline fulled by magic and the steady, cold pressure of moon-fire at her shoulder.

“Someone told me once that magic is like a sea waiting deep in the dark of us. First all we can see is the shine of it, like a glimmer of glass along the horizon.” Isra begins loudly. Each word echoes the soft thump of her hooves on the packed dirt. It sounds a little like a story begging to be a war, all violence and no wonder. She inhales as she draws the lunar bow and notches an arrow. The glow of it makes her eyes look like hooded, blue flames caught in the darkness of her face. “You have to go deeper, past the riptide, to find the belly of it. It should feel like you are suffocating” Isra gathers her steps, turns and tries (so very hard) to aim above the peak of Morrighan's hip.

Even now she laments against hurting things that she loves.

Isra exhales.“Try to burn it.”When she releases the arrow it whistles through the air like a falling star singing through the black space of night. It's not until the arrow is inches from Morrighan that Isra closes her eyes. The glow of the arrow winks out so that it is nothing more than black, flexible wood and a glass point rushing at Morrighan.

She opens her eyes, angles her body back to the larger circle, and continues to trot.


“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

Isra and the learning of violence

Battle does not come as easy as she expected it to come. Her bones move too much like a tired sea to be methodical or truly dangerous. Even her horn is still more like a crown than a weapon. All this time she's been learning to feel like vengeance. A drumbeat has been pushing along her blood more than a heartbeat. Each morning she wakes with the taste of blood on her tongue and an ache in her heart that keeps saying you are not done, not yet.

Isra has been waiting for war and she still stumbles on the flat ground when she watches blood rise from the wound her arrow has made. Another fissure blooms between all the other cracks on her heart when she thinks of how that arrow point must have felt. She shivers and tells herself that she must go on.

She always must go on, and on, and on. So she does.

But she's still looking at that blooming blood and it's drowning out everything else. It's making her slow-- slow enough that she hardly realizes that Morrighan has turned on her with teeth and fury instead of magic. Isra pulls back and the lash of teeth find only the muscle of her neck. The pain makes her inhale sharply. It's been so long since that dark alley. She's forgotten how much teeth can hurt.

This time, even though her hooves are still unsteady on the ground (there is too much pain and worry bogging her down), it's her magic that rises to her defense. It roars in her blood. Only the quiet word  Fable offers her from where he is watching, steady, tethers it down to something like a wolf instead of a shark.

When magic starts to leak out from her, she's no longer trotting. She's only watching Morrighan with concern instead of anger. Frustration is something she can understand. It makes monsters of them all. Isra smiles. Between them the dirt starts turning to brambles both thorny and flowerless. They spread like oil, and soon it's a sea of thorns that is separating Morrighan from Isra. As far as attacks go it's a terrible one. But--

It's obvious that the brambles are dry and just begging for a flame.

“Even embers can be a dangerous weapon if you're clever enough.” Isra steps back even though her eyes are blazing a challenge (and her neck is still aching). “So be clever. Sink deeper.” She inhales and holds her breath, hoping that it's only worry making her blood flow like a tattered thread through her body.


“We are each a tiny moon.”

Isra and the clever flame

At first it is only her beast of magic chanting in her belly-- yes, yes, yes. It's watching like it sometimes does. Isra is too lost in the weight of all that darkness swirling like a sea inside her to notice how the brambles cut and feast on blood when Morrighan slashes her front legs into it. All she can see is the way the anger is rippling over the warrior.

The air is salted with smoke and dead wood. It burns when she swallows it down. The taste of it, all fury and nothing of hope, makes her back away from the brambles. Part of her wants to back away from the demon in her belly that is still chanting yes, yes, yes over and over again as it keeps begging for a flame.

Then suddenly there is a spark. Isra's magic goes silent with a sigh, and it's only her left chanting in her own skin. No. No. No. The words echo in her bones as the fire spreads. She imagines that she can see teeth in the way the flames keep eating, and eating, and eating.

Isra does not  pause to wonder why her magic is silent, or where it went, before she's lurching back from the field of fire. There is nothing graceful in the way she's moving. There is too much smoke for her lungs to be anything but frantic. Isra is all unicorn on the burning mountain now, all fear and survival. It feels like another one of her nightmares.

In the distance Fable takes to the sky. He's still telling her, steady, steady, be steady, and that he's still the only massive dragon left in this world. And even though he's telling Isra that she will not burn while there is life left in his body, she cannot help the way her heart keeps beating like a hummingbird. It's not until she's running over around the fire towards Morrighan in a gait that is more feral than civilized that her heart cools in her chest. “I'm ok.”, she calls out the reassurance when she hears her name rise above the roar of the fire.

Isra doesn't stop running until she's back at Morrighan's side. Only then does she smile as she tries to wipe the brief terror (memory born) from her wide eyes. “You did it.” Around them the fires is still blazing, smoke it still making her eyes burn, and yet she can't help the way it's mostly amazement she feels.

Denocte is more than just dreamers now.

“a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”

Isra who starts a race


There is smoke pooling in her nose and scratching at the back of her throat like wings each time she inhales. Isra shouldn't feel like laughing but she does. Perhaps if she wasn't always feeling so reckless now it would be different. There is still a war drumming low and heavy in her chest and her magic roaring like a tide in her blood. So when she laughs it's not quite glass bell soft.

If the sea could laugh it would sound like Isra.

Fable swoops low as a hawk. The wind starts to smell a little like brine. “Fable will put it out, but he's terribly inaccurate so we should hurry home.” Isra can't help the way her eyes keep aching to look upward to her dragon as heavy drops of salt-water start to fall across her back. Something terrible and awful inside her welcomes those drops of salt and cool-water. Something craves it. Isra tries to bury that part of her, and each time is harder than the last.

“I'll race you home.” And then without warning Isra kicks her heels up into a canter and turns back towards their city by the sea.

Fable waits until they are gone to practice. The elk and the deer do not come to watch, nothing does, and he tries not to let it make him feel like a monster.  

“that's a good love; one that burns and flies,”