Isra who smiled at a beast

Each of her sharp edges makes itself into a blade until she's full of broken glass swords with jagged hungry points. Even the touch of Eik in the darkness where her magic is running through her like a monster does nothing to piece back those shards of fury. But rather they touch each shard of love in him and they say, break with me.

Isra wants to break like the cave is breaking over head in a wave of weaponry and petals that look like a dead man. She wants to split open her ribs until her magic crawls forth like a bear and devours Raum.

But what she wants most of all, when Eik is finally there standing before her like a oak in a furious storm, is to feel anything but violence. She wants to feel love instead of sorrow, hot skin instead of blood. Between her ribs her heart is throbbing fiercely and each throb is a note to a song she's always sung for him. The cool sea of her soul reaches out through the fury of magic and it says, I'm here, I'm here. And then her nose is singing melodies over his hip, his spine, his cheek as she draws closer to her stallion turned dragon.

Outside the birds are screaming as Eik silently screams and she's still there painting words on skin. A swirl of her lips promises him that she too knows. Her horn is tapping out the sound of fear against Eik's cheek and her eyes are blazing hot in the dark dirt color of her face. In that sea between her and Eik she starts to write words made of glass and blood-ink.

He should be afraid of me. Of us. The glass spells out the words in black swirls of furious magic. Each of her kisses leaves trails of blood across his gray skin but that too seems like something right

She is not the same Isra that wondered among the buffalo with him with stardust in her gaze. But no matter what Isra she is now, all she knows is that....

Every form of her will love him more than the last.

And now she's the Isra full of violence that is bringing down the cave in metal blades. Her dragon is outside waiting and all the deer and birds have already left this dark place. The world is trembling with the same promise of death that's blazing in her eyes as she watches Raum turn and disappear into the darkness. “Run far Raum.” Each of her words is an arrow shot into the dark, through that mouth of metal. “Run, because you and I are not done.” Her magic reaches out along her words like a bolt of lightning reaching down a wire. Everything it touches chances to a weapon and she thinks that make the entire cave in back in the darkness might be reaching hungrily for bone-white skin as it flees.

Above them the cave is starting to tremble more, unable to hold the weight of all her magic. Outside Fable is urging them to hurry in his own language for he too knows the cave is waiting to erase all the sins the brought to it. “We need to go.” The stardust comes back to her eyes as she pushes against him. But the magic is still swirling dark below that moon-dust shine of her gaze, swirling dark and ominous like an approaching storm. Isra hopes he cannot see it, she hopes the love drowns it out.

All the things Raum has let loose in her bones are already spreading like a sickness. She does not think that she will ever be able to cage them again (or tame this beast of vengeance).

Even as it collapses, and she's moving away from it, the cave is still lurking in that sea of glass she's trying to piece back together with the fire of Eik's love. Violence has touched her, but Isra did not run from it this time.

This time she looked at violence and hate, smiled and said, come closer.


"What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark?"