here is a certain freedom in being a wolf, or a lion, or anything with tooth and claw. She can feel it racing electric through her blood. There is all this power, and fury, and rage sitting inferno hot in her bones. It's leaking out through each crack in her heart. Each time she looks at his dark eyes, and the ghosts long gone outside his shadow, it rises like the dead.

She smiles. It's all teeth and soot-black skin. Her horn sighs when she cants it up and it shines when an arrow casts sunlight to catch in the creases of her expression. Isra wants to kill him, and Fable sweeping lower and lower through the clouds wants to drown him in the sea. Her magic flickers in her-- waiting, waiting, waiting. Her dragon is waiting too, and each thought he's sharing is darker than the last.

The city will be better off without him, Fable says. I know, Isra replies.

But when she glaces behind her she can see the starved and the beaten gathering at that hole in the wall. There are too many of them to press through the single hole, and those waiting are starting to look heavy with sorrow and lost hope. Her smile fades and more sand becomes jagged, waiting blooms. The notched arrows flies wide towards him-- a taunt. “You'll learn.” Another arrow lifts and then releases towards him. This one she aims.

Isra is thinking, though, off all the starved and fearful loosing hope for freedom. She's thinking of wolves and lions. More of the ground behind her turns to sand and more in front of her turns to thirsty blades. Now the word lashes through her furious, just as Fable dives into the city with a roar.

Horses press tighter against the wall when Isra and her dragon turn towards them. The ground looks blacker than black beneath his wings. She starts to run, leaving blade upon blade in her wake. Fable is swinging his tail side to side so that nothing terrible might get too close to them. She does not stop running until she reaches the wall.

And just as her and Fable as about to crash into the wall, a massive section if it turns into paper hornets with lines of ink cutting through them-- like blood.

She hopes all those horses will follow them, out into the desert where can she grow oats from dead wood, and apples from stone. Fable loops around to protect them and there is the dark sea in his eyes. Only Isra knows that with it are thoughts of drowning.

a king walks among us

Tension holds the world taut, taut as the string of her invisible bow, her magic-bow, her will-bow, and one misses, but when she speaks this second one, yes, that second one, it comes toward him and he has almost a sliver of dedication to letting it hit him.

Despair. 

He sidesteps, the arrowhead whizzing past his black black flesh as he watches her dash away, the world turning to blades and thorns and blades again. The wall turns to paper hornets with black bloody ink and a strange strange creature flies along side her, and so many, so many people flood from the city. 

”Perhaps,” he murmurs.


@Isra || Devil Woman
”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“
I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,