“The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.”

The earth drags in a breath that burns its throat.
A hush falls over the coast.

Michael's mind is a mess of disjointed and arrhythmic poetry, some thought that went skittering across the waves the second it entered his head. He has not felt chaos like this in a while but he could walk its streets if he wanted, darting through alleys and nodding at every stray cat on the sidewalks. Sometimes all he is is chaos. Sometimes Michael is not himself but what he used to be, a sturdy rock against which the waves break. More often he is the waves, breaking.

It is a gray day but Michael is still dappled sunlight and contradictory things. The gulls land, hushed, and most things Michael remembers are turned to dandelions that are in their turn pushed out to sea:

The ground beneath him, pushed out;
the dark sand clumped in his feathers, pushed out;
the breath in his lungs, the breath that the earth had been holding, pushed out.

Maybe the magic that used to pulse from him in rings of things unthinkable is what plants him firmly in the sovereign's plane of dandelions. He recalls he could never do something so tangible but each second in her presence is a dreamscape born over and over again and he thinks that if there is nothing left in this world that he knows the name of he does know, intimately, what it is like to live in someone else's dream. Michael goes cold under her touch.

"Me too," he almost whispers. There in the distance is the dragon's head, the dragon's neck, and Michael cannot see that he too hums with this energy like gnashing teeth and a night with no stars. The golden horse plucks a dandelion from the wet sheet of his mane and holds it up to the light.

"Isra," he begins before blowing the seeds into the gray afternoon sky, "are you okay?" Now, finally, he turns to look at her, a sizzling pool, a geyser bubbling just under the water's surface. It is these times that Michael seems callous, lost to some far away time that has no connection to their present and certainly not their future. He is thinking of the dragon in the surf. He is thinking of Isra's city on the hill. He is thinking of her and there is a rock in his stomach because he does not know her well at all but he worries, still. "What are you going to do?"

“The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.”

Michael is his own apocalypse and if he dies each morning he is remaking himself each day, hoping to resurrect into something that is not made so ugly by pain or cavernous in the face of this mounting desire to be unmade; he is empty and he is dark, a shack with no electricity, a shack at the bottom of the ocean. 

I’m ok, Isra breathes, and Michael almost laughs. “I’m ok” is not one long scream punctuated by wet sobs. “I’m ok” does not smile the way Michael smiles, wolfish and desperate with its tongue pressed tight against the back of its teeth. “I’m ok” is not a large wound trying to cauterize itself on the fires of vengeance.

Sorry, Isra, he knows. Consider the silent gulls, watching them from the cliffsides and the mountainous sea rocks; they mourn. Consider the dandelions bunching still at his ankles; they mourn. Consider her skin that crackles with unspoken spells and the sizzling of magic run wild; it mourns. 

Consider the heavy silence that falls between them, Michael’s expression is grim and off in the distance Fable is churning like the ocean churns but twice as loud. He echoes the things that she doesn’t say and if Michael hadn’t known that Isra is an exposed bone, a caustic and ragged and violent ghost sweeping through Novus like a thing possessed, surely he has seen it now.

I am going to kill Raum, Isra says; her voice does not shake. “Then you are going to kill Raum,” Michael answers, “and you are going to free Solterra.”

And she will. Michael is not a creature prone to doubt in the first place but he has seen her peel back reality and remake it without even thinking. If he has been sure of any one thing in his life it is that Isra can bring to ruin any single thing that she wants. Even the ghost that walks through their shadows and haunts the attics of the hearts.

He nods, maybe to reassure himself. The roar of a dragon rings loud in his ears. And, unexpectedly–“Isra, please–”what? He doesn’t know.

(He does know, but it is one of the innumerable things that they do not say, that he does not say in specific, either because they cannot or they do not want to, or both. Please come home. Please stop becoming a weapon and wrecking yourself on the rocks out at sea. Please do literally anything but what you are doing).

“The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.”

He would stand among her stones. He does stand. He would beg for sharp edges and blood and a baptism in rock and saltwater if only it meant that she was not on the other side of some deep and cold crevasse, drowning herself in her fire. Michael would make her soft again and carry her home except that he does not know how to.

Now and again he is struck by just what he does not know. They must number in the millions.

He is searching her eyes, now, and he does not know what he hopes to find. She is spinning at the end of her rope and searching for his hand, but he does not know what she hopes to find.

Before he can speak she finds… probably not what she sought, but something nonetheless. Her wishes become hard and bitter things that bruise his ankles (I won’t, he thinks, I won’t run from this. I won’t.) but it is not until Fable that he speaks. Fable, who rises from the swells as if he were just a beast from the sea. Fable, that leans down toward Michael and drips sea water and algae onto him. Fable, that Michael angles his head toward, mouth still drawn in that straight, grim line – he is a thing out of storybooks and so is Isra and so is Michael and they stand, for a moment, together and tense, burdened by so many things that they do not say.

Michael looks back toward Isra. The wet blanket of his mane is still bunched about his face but his stare is hard (pained) nonetheless.

His voice shakes when he whispers “Don’t do this.”

Here are the breaking waves. Here are the gulls fleeing the scene though they still do not say a word to the unicorn and the dragon and the horse that walked out of a dream and never stopped walking. Here are several ships at once, dashed against Isra’s stones. Here are the gray rocks and the red ache of them amongst their ankles.

Michael clears his throat. Michael prays to at least ten gods that he doesn’t believe in. To his knowledge none of them belong to Novus. The tide and the clattering beach and the water dripping from Fable, from Michael, sing the dark reprise of some ancient hymn. Michael says: “Let me tell you a story,” and the breath he draws in preparation is made louder by a trembling that rolls from his lips to his knees.

“It begins like this: something groaning to life, something probably long dead, or at least it feels like it. Something that has been dead but in motion for more years than it can count. It has been broken and reforged a thousand times but it is always either too heavy to move or too light to keep from floating away. It begins with this and it begins with you and your city. Somehow.”

“And it should end there, by the lake, with Fable, or weeks later, under the night sky, naming each and every star still visible in the market glow. Anything but how it did. before you and your city and your people were gripped by tragedy and before you… ” Michael pauses. He feels like the ragged edges of a deep wound. “Survived. And I’m so, so glad you survived. And I’m sorry that you survived at such a cost. I get it. You have to. I know you have to.”

“Please come home, though.”