Isra of the bonfires

'and we danced like pagans while the world around us crumbled and died'



The night is as lovely as it has ever been, glittering and dark enough to take from the world every scar and stain and thing that dares to be brightly hideous. The sky is dusted with a rainbow of colors, the aurora borealis weavs like a snake back and forth across the darkness. Green and yellow and golds shine bright enough to make her think (make her wish and wish and wish) that the entire world could be as lovely as that sky above her heard. 

But while the night is perfect the markets are nothing more than a pale star, flicking out the last of its life behind  brighter stars than it. The stones glitter in wrong patterns beneath her hooves-- a brick where a ruby should be, an emerald where once a diamond reflected the moon-glow. Once the paths about the market looked like the stars. Once if she closed her eyes hard enough that they stung the world could look upside down when she opened them again. 

Once this was a place of dreams, of wishes, of wild things that pretended to be civilized if only for one single night in century of full moons. 

Now only the bonfire's blaze where laughter once did, crackling in the silence and popping where sighs once broke the silent parts of the dark. Even the whisper of tiny dragon wings seem quiet and hushed as if they too know just how heavy and still the night feels now. 

Isra, as she walks between the bonfires and gives what little hope and promises she can to the merchants, feels as if she walks through a swamp of sadness with snakes of sorrow swirling about her legs. Here and there she nudges stones back into place in the pathways and holds straight a silken canopy for a merchant. 

Tonight she is nothing more than another face in the crowd, easy to miss with all the darkness and strewn about stones at her hooves. She's another broken soul that looks up the beauty of the sky that hopes and hopes for something more than destruction and sadness and dreams dashed on violent waves. 

The merchants add another batch of driftwood to the fires. They cheer and start to dance as it burns and smoke rises from the pyres of the past. And when they start to dance in dizzying circles of wishes, jasmine and silk she joins them. 

It feels like freedom to be just another dark body in the thin masses. Tonight she's just a unicorn that dances on doe hooves and smiles at the not-quite stranger that comes close enough to the fire to look as bright as the glowing lights above her head (above them all). 


@Kauri

Isra of the red-light

'I only could see your eyes as the world fell down, down, down'



There is no music tonight but the crack and pop of the fire as sap in the wood boils and bursts. There is only the victory chants of the merchants, rage muted by joy and hope. The night is a tempest of sound, waves of things that are not quite melodic clashing together to fill the night with a soft kind of violence that is close enough to the sound of living to be elegant enough to move her hooves again and again in dance.

Isra feels like a star has exploded in her, a super-nova of need, of hope, of stories that need more and more than the blood in her veins to live. The world flashes around in her flares of light, gold and red, silver and black. And in the corner of her eyes that glimpse of violet and bone-white seems brighter than all the rest, bright in the dark solitude that surrounds it.

He blazes like the sliver of the moon before it's made new again, quiet and silver and nothing more than a scythe of bone between the constellations far lovelier than that half-dead moon. It feels like an dream when she lets her hooves carry her further and further away from the fire. Isra feels like a star, drawn to that dying moon just to linger in the sickle curve of it and make it part of a new constellation.

Oh! Oh how she wonders what secrets live in his solitude, what stain his soul might bear. What he carries  to make her recognize his sadness as a mate to her own as easily as she blinks.

Isra leaves the fire, the song of the furious living, and almost forgets to wonder why it's so easy to leave all the glittering parts of life behind for the dark without hesitation. She beds down easily beside him, light as a feather drifting down on the winter winds. Her chain is the only thing to break the softness of her movement and it clangs and sounds like shattering glass in the muted silence of their dark corner.

There is enough space between them for the winter to creep in with tendrils of frost and snow. She shivers so far from the fires and the sweat on her skin from dancing so close to the flames turns to ice where rests on the stone. Idly she wonders if it looks like salt where it collects on her lips when she drops them to the ground and pushes a ruby into the fire-light just to watch it shine like blood.

“Their hope is beautiful.” Isra offers the words like a story and she wonders if ink pours from between her teeth when the night slips between her smile. “But sometimes I feel that it might burn as much as the fire does.” Tonight feels like a revelation when she looks at him, sorrow to a sorrow that's just starting to shed from her skin like flesh from the bone of antlers as the seasons change.

She wonders what he sees when he looks at the fire and the dancers that move not like horses but like beasts in the red-light.


@Kauri

Isra the falling star

'I'm going to live forever and learn how to fly'



For a moment Isra watches not the stallion, not the way his eyes are full of darkness and rusted glitz that's long forgot how to shine. Isra watches only the fire, only the horses bolder than the two of them resting in the shadows on stones shot through with quartz and gold and amethyst. Her soul cries for the hope, that dreaming thing that feels so dark and endless as much as it feels like a lit fire before a worn and cracked mirror.

Her skin shivers were it's against the stone and her side closet to him still burns and her eyes blink away the sight of the bonfire like it's dust and soot. She feels like the branch of a river, bits of her floating down the waters like pieces of wood and leaves, torn apart where the currents intersect in a whirlpool of a hundred small streams of force.

The dancers seem at home by the fire, dancing like pagans in the smoke that makes them look two headed. The stallion seems easy in the darkness and the winter chill with his fox tucked between his legs with more trust than she knew the world could hold. And Isra feels at home at neither place and her heart strains and quivers like a bow with no direction to go but out, out to the fire and out to the darkness and out past both these things into the greatness beyond.

Out to the sea.

But she feels something other than 'out' when she looks back at him and smiles when he corrects her. “I think if anything this might turn to cinders but never ash, never soot to blow away on the breeze.” Her voice is as smooth and sometimes sharp at the embedded stones at their bellies and along the jutting joints of their legs. There are a million small, smoldering bits of cinder in her voice, young fires that float upon a endless sea of storms.

He turns from honey to stone, molasses to amber and she wants to smile through the hard sorrow of his voice, the winter-chill of his tundra. Isra wants to break the silence with laughter and look out past his back and out to the stars and say 'What skeleton? What corpse?. She wants to touch his cheek with her lips and smile knowingly to feel flesh and not bone beneath her touch.

Isra wants and wants and wants but in the end she only echoes the stone of his voice (but it sounds like stardust from her lungs). “You are no more just bones than I and there are no shadows but the spots between the stars too thick with mystery for the light to shine. Is it so very hard to believe that you don't have to be alone?” And when she lets her voice fade into the soft whisper of their breathes and the crackle of the distant fire it falls not like silence should. It falls like a shooting start that just might carry....

A wish.


@Kauri

Isra the moonlight magic

'I want to be a God of a girl'

He turns from the flames and Isra watches him, watches the way his colors fold in the night like dreams into dream-catchers. For moment she's jealous of how easily his edges turn to shadows and she wonders if the light of the fire still leaves a blazing sun in the center of his gaze. Part of her wants to dissolve into the darkness with him, to live as a star (telling stories in pulses with the blanket of night pulls over the world).

But then the merchants toss more driftwood onto the bonfire and she's caught like a star in a cloud, watching that soot and fire and smoke rise up to swallow up the moon. A pygmy dragon dips in the sky and his wings bring from the smoke grand patterns that to Isra look like a million, glittering snakes that circle the world. The dragon swoops and dances and soon a few others join him and they dance and twine their necks together in arrangements of wonder.

Isra's eyes feel dry from watching them. She never blinks as she remembers that she doesn't want to dissolve into the night, she wants to burn and smolder and devour all the heartbreak in the world. Her skin starts to itch where it touches the ground and the rubies glitter like treasure in the corner of her gaze when she turns it back to the shadows and him.

She blinks for his words, for the spell of his sorrow and his sadness and they way his tongue moves over the sound of 'rot'. Isra is captured in the web of his sorrow, eager to feel the pinch and sting of his melancholy like teeth on a veins. “Be brave.” She whispers as she might to an old book and she's tender enough in her command to not crack him like an old leather binding.

And the silence between them feels a little like the empty space between chapters, thick with potential and ink stains.

“Isra.” She corrects, blinking away the stab of the sound so formal a title makes in her black, stained slave-soul. “I will die to keep all my promises if the fates require it of me.” Like a true unicorn of legend she makes her bond and it shivers down her body in shards of ice and moonlit-magic.

“I still worry though that Caligo was wrong to choose me that night.” The last she offers like a gift, the blackness of her uncertainty for the darkness of his own.

And in the silence between her last word and the next inhale of her lungs a child comes before them. He asks Isra to dance, egged on by the taunts of his friends. She smiles turning back to stallion with something close to amusement in her ocean-eyes before leaving him to head back towards the fires and smoke and joy.

@Kauri