Isra the fool heart

'the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.” '


The lake is the one part of the court that Isra is not intimately familiar with and perhaps that is why she is struck with the beauty of it. Everything is gilded in silver and glitter where the stars dance like many sisters overheard. Even the shores, littered with glass-like feathers and bones and charred out holes, is as lovely as it is eerie under the moonlight. The weapons strewn about seem nothing more than relics of an older-time, a time where blood-lust and rage reigned and moonlight was nothing more than a dream.

It's hard in the lovely moonlight to glide her gaze over the warriors that have joined them, to dive deep into the heartbreak she feels to see their flesh so sinned upon. Perhaps that is why, as she steps into a ray of silver-light where a star reflects strangely off the point of her horn, Isra feels as if she sheds a skin.

In the moonlight it feels as if her unicorn skin and sea-scales flake off like rust from a sword. And she becomes something else, something new, something made of ink and paper and leather. “Faith, This new Isra says and her eyes dance like paper-thin vellum in a storm as she looks to Caligo and Katniss and all the others (all the ones she loves, all the ones she would die for).

“We must have faith.” Inside her something blooms beneath the night-lights. A yawning universes churns inside her and meteors lash against her bones and she thinks that she might explode in ink and moonbeams and stardust if she doesn't move right now.

And so move she does.

She pulls away from the others. Under her hooves the strange feathers bend and sometimes crack and she thinks perhaps that not-to-far-away eyes turn to that unicorn (who feels like something else) who walks across their battle-field and their grave-yard. Each step brings that universe inside her closer and closer to her skin, closer to the air, closer to life.

Isra remembers reading once in a book that had no title, that monsters loved stories as much a children do. For what dreaming soul takes the time to look at a beast and say, you are lovely, you are worthy? Who braves the darkest caves in the world to whisper fables to creatures who hardly know how to dream? At the time she though it a brave thing to do, foolish but brave. What, she remembers thinking, is the point in telling the story that will be your last?

Now she understands---

A cloud shifts overhead and Isra folds herself into a bed of strange feathers. And when the cloud shifts again the moonlight glints off her and her nest of feathers until she is the brightest thing by the lake. “Once there was a dragon and there was a lion in a world where the trees bleed not sap but gold,” Her voice rings out, louder than the wind. Louder and louder and louder until she's calling all those distant eyes.

“That world was as lovely as it was dangerous. The swamps were wild with sharks, and the seas were wild with birds. Everything in this world was broken, made strange by some sickness that had long ago sunk into the soil and the ocean and the sky. All of the world was tainted.” Overhead the moon still glows and Isra still shimmers and she's a lovely sort of fool.

“Everything was tainted exceptt for the dragon and the lion. They were both very lonely in their sick world, so lonely they thought they could die,”  Isra pauses, looks back to the others, hoping that perhaps they understand both the story and the idea of faith.

Faith in themselves and in the mortality of monsters who might be as foolish as horses, unicorns and gods and  can sometimes be.

@Katniss @Random Events

Their new queen was mad.

It’s all he could think as he watched her go out beneath that dark and foreboding sky and that glass-looking lake over ground still marred by blood and gouge-marks and bodies. It was not, he thought, so very different than the seafloor once all the water had retreated, which was to say it was wrong.

But they were all a little mad, anyway - maybe they always had been, in Denocte. A touch of derangement like a shimmer of starlight over all of them. And besides, Caligo was standing right there, and surely she would let nothing happen to the queen she had so recently chosen to lead her people. (Not that he knows, lately, just what to think of their goddess - not that he ever has thought much of her at all).

Still he watched the unicorn walk out to the midst of that battleground with something strange, something like worry, twisting in his gut. He did not care for the feeling, foreign and sour like a stranger’s wine, and the buckskin took a few steps out after her, until he stood between the queen and the rest of the group, waiting for whatever would come next.

Half of him is attuned to her story, one ear twisting, almost wistful, toward her - but his match-light eyes are watching the sky, wondering what the hell he’ll do when/if the birds came, and when/if they struck.

All he had were his illusions and a pocketful of magic tricks, and those had never done much when it came to real trouble. Acton would use them if he must -

but first he’d see how this bizarre evening began to unspool, like one of Isra’s stories made real.

He licked his teeth and wondered if this one would have a happy ending. 

we have a flair for the shade and in-between

he's useless but he's here

Calliope
“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.”


Calliope is already pacing along the lake when they arrive. Violence rolls of her in waves of sweat and spark. Each step of her hooves is a statement of war for she cracks feathers and bones beneath her, hoping that perhaps the sound of it travels out to wherever the thunder-birds are licking their wounds. The horn above her head sighs like hungry steel when she turns and canters towards the others, watching their foolish queen bed herself down like an offering.

Part of Calliope wants to laugh for that innocent, stupid hopefulness of the other unicorn. Another part of it is ready to die to protect the fragile, innocent things of the world from the depravity of monsters.

For now she doesn't follow, only turns to the other mare and answers. “There are thunder-birds somewhere in the distance. And we are here to see if they will try to kill us or befriend us.” And when her eyes turn towards Caligo the moon glints off the battle-wounds on her neck still crusted with blood. Her eyes are not silver-blue anymore. They are rolling pits of sparks, sometimes weak but always furious.

The stallion puts something in Calliope on edge and her gaze when it settles on him is not unlike how a lion might look at a jackal. His feet never take another step towards their queen and Calliope judges him for the way he stands in the between, neither on one side or the other.

“If nothing else Isra has given them a target and us an easy way to judge what sort of monsters the birds will be today.” Her voice is thick with emotion and memory and her skin is alive with white-light that licks across her spine is hisses of a lash. Calliope says nothing else as she brushes past the other mare, past the goddess and pass the stallion to stand guard a few feet from the queen.

And where one unicorn beckons the beasts with story and hope the other calls to them with the low charge of a storm that is nothing to the boiling tornado of hate in her eyes. Calliope in that moment doesn't feel like a unicorn at all

She feels like an empty battle-field waiting for the drums and the trumpets.

The road from there to here had done nothing to assuage Raymond's misgivings, either spoken or unspoken. Their goddess led them like cattle to what could as easily be a slaughterhouse as a verdant field and offered no support, no strength, no words that they mortals could not have produced alone. He wasn't sure yet whether that threatened to put him at ease or justify his atheism.

Maybe, he wanted to say, someone should walk up to them, and if they tear that horse's head off we'll know they don't want to be friends, because comedy was always a great way to fill the spaces between actions. But Isra stepped forward with newfound conviction and spoke of faith, and it took a great deal of the strength the red stallion had left to restrict the upwelling wave of displeasure to a slow tilt of his eyes down and away, toward Calliope.

Faith had almost ruined him. It festered in the wounds of crumbling edifices, disguising itself like golden kintsugi until the day the weight of its rot grew too great.

Faith was no friend to Raymond.

If nothing else, Isra has given them a target, Calliope said. The red stallion would have happily agreed with her, but for the fact that the neck stretched so prettily for the guillotine would be an absolute bitch to bury later. And if the night queen wanted to risk her life for faith, then her regent would have to risk his to keep her safe.

With a sigh into pursed lips, Raymond stepped forward to join Isra, wearing the black-glass stillness of the lake before sunrise. He moved like he was untouchable - not because he had faith, but because he knew exactly what he wanted and exactly what he was capable of - and his eyes were neither entranced by Isra's story nor frightened by the Thunderbirds.

He offered not the barest hint of antagonism beyond the weight of his own self-assurance, but heaven help bird or beast that dared to threaten the night queen in that moment.