Isra who was forged by a ghost

Isra doesn't know when she started fighting for something more than her own emotions.

Once all she wanted to be was brave, something more than a ghost running with bones beneath her hooves through the mountains. All she hoped to feel was a fire in her belly that whispered to her of walking, of looking up towards the moon and seeing something other than stars that looked like silver tears in the darkness. Each step she took once felt like a dying night, glory (so much glory) that had nothing left to do but end.

Once she wanted to be full of nothing more than love. The organ in her ribs pulsed and it beat in a steady lub, lub, lub. Then it ached in a steady song that that spelled, E-i-k. Her eyes shined with only bonfires and tiny dragon wings. Each day a dream came to her of magic, of her shining city by the sea, of love enough to live, and live, and live. And the moon always brought with it more wonder, more love.

Once. Once. Once. Isra doesn't know what it is now that makes her fight against the eternal call of the distant sea. Once she knew. But oh, oh she knows almost nothing now. She is fighting though, oh she is fighting.

All she knows is the way Eik paints a fire across her skin that she once wanted to fill her belly. There is a dream in each of his kisses that makes her want to lay her head down on a pillow and never greet the sun again. This is the sea on which she wants to drown, somewhere in all that fire spreading fast and furious between them. Isra doesn't know if she's burning with the dregs of anger and the smoldering coals of justice, or if she's on fire with love, sorrow and briny graves.

She. Is. Just. Burning.

“Don't.” The word is painted on him with sharp kissed filled with the fading acid burn of poison. Isra burns it into the flesh of his hip with all the heat of her love as he turns from her. If she should she would etch it across his bones with magic, so that they might never kiss and say I'm sorry to each other again.

Isra isn't sorry. She's not sorry that the monster himself was foolish enough to forge the blade that would cut out his heart. Isra will never be sorry for that.

Fable though, as all dragons do, knows exactly what it is he's ready to go to war for. The sea might be his world, the deep dark the blackness that soothes away the wildness of him. Isra is his. Raum hurt her. Raum will die. He's not sure why his unicorn and this gray horse are full of apologizes and second thoughts. To him it's all black and white, sunlight sea and deep sea. But he still says, You're welcome. to the stallion because he thinks that the horse needs to hear the words. And his touch is ocean cold and salted when he brushes his nose across the stallion's brow like a mountain oak brushes the wind.

Isra, with the wildness in her eyes, steps forward towards Eik when he turns back. She brushes a kiss across his dirty cheek and there's cave-dust on her lips.

Isra, the weapon forged, is never stepping backwards again.


"Fire sears my veins. I choke back a howl. "

She says "Don't--" as he suspected she would, with all the heat of the fires that once burned to ash everything he knew. He smiles sadly. Sorrow is a part of him that will never be erased, not for all the heartbreaking don'ts in this great, beautiful world. He thinks she knows that. He thinks she feels it too. Is that not what drew him to her, their first night together? He couldn't not be sorry, just as much as he couldn't undo the scars carved into his skin.

(even if he could-- would he?)

Eik's flight up the mountain should have left him exhausted, but adrenaline still electrifies his nerves and sends his thoughts in a hundred directions. He wants to make sure Isra is okay. He wants to stay here forever with her and leave the world to its ruin. He wants to run and run and not ever stop until the shapeshifter is between his teeth. The dragon's cold touch on his forehead does not settle him but he is grateful for it nonetheless. A sort of understanding is growing in him, but it does not yet have a name.

When he turns around he studies the dark, graceful line of his love's lips, and he recalls hearing secondhand (not just once but many times) how stories flowed from them like water, and he wonders if she will ever tell this one or if the truth will stay between them...

And when he rethinks his thoughts, pacing back and forth without moving a muscle, he realizes that he doesn't understand the word truth. Or rather, a new understanding dawns. Because Raum could not know the truth of this story without understanding how fate came to weave the lovers together, and Eik could not know the truth without seeing how the blood poured from Acton's body. And Isra could not know how she looks more beautiful, not less, for the dirt and grime that cover her and the tangles in her mane and the glint of war in her eyes. 

(And he thinks he might not ever tell her how stunning she is in this moment, how much she moves him. It feels right to keep something to himself-- how easily most things spill out of him, in her presence.)

The illusion of truth collapses, and he finds himself holding pieces that do not perfectly fit together. Maybe she will tell this story to him some day, and the course of events, shaped by her words, might finally make sense.

Eik's attention moves from her lips to the delicate but determined line of her jaw. He knows she could be ruthless, if she wanted to-- if she needed to. And maybe his heart should sink in recognition of the gears set in motion. Maybe he should recognize that the odds are against him, in life, in love, in all of it-- and he never was a gambling man anyway, never liked the idea of chance making decisions for him-- but hell, he'd stake his soul on her. Over and over. Until the end of days.

She kisses him on the cheek. He thought that his blood, in all its passion and fury, had boiled over to rust. So oh, what a surprise it is, when he feels it surge in and out of his tissue-paper heart. He leans in to her touch, and then steps past it and alongside her to rest his head on her withers. "Can you... create water?" The limits of her magic-- another thing they've never talked about. Another thing they never needed to. "Or can you make it to the stream?" 

They will rest, and recover, and weave plans. They will mourn. They will have vengeance and it will be wicked, and it will be sweet. 

But first, they will have a bath.

E I K
"Like the sea of my life waters had opened up.
Like my wounds had something in them besides hurt."

Isra who sung the heart-song

Love. Isra has never defined herself by the word; she has never thought to. Nor has she ever thought to define herself in the shape of a stallion's eye. But now when Eik looks at her with all the weight of a universe Isra thinks that she has never known how to shape herself.

But now she knows. She knows it the moment the fires lick church pillars across the plane of her ribs. She knows the moment in which she has become all the things that a primordial beast made her to be. Eik's eyes hold everything that she is, everything that she ever wants to be-- love and sorrow, war and a vicious sort of hope. How did she ever think that the creature between them could not unleash her?

She is unleashed the moment she tastes the salt and blood on his skin (her blood, of course it's her blood). If it was his she would have torn the mountain down and let all the god churches burn down to nothing. There is no world Isra will not destroy for his life, no weapon she will not wield.

Maybe that is all love is. Love is madness and Isra is mad, mad, mad for her city and this scar coated man.

Fable turns away towards the wood and soon the trees swallow him whole. This is not a moment for him. He knows that in his bones. Just like the sea knows that it will never under understand each thing hidden beneath desert sands, Fable knows he could never understand this madness between lovers (and he is hungry anyway).

Isra tries to smile but her lips cannot bring themselves to part from his skin. They are tracing each scar, laying kisses across suffering as if she can draw each from his skin. She wants her touch to be the antidote to every ounce of pain and every dark deed that still lays coiled in each of them like a sea of waiting snakes. So instead of smiling she whispers to the curl of his ribs and wonders if her voice sounds like a roaring fire or a cool rain. “I could make it to the end of the world if you asked it of me.” For him she would do anything, even if her body told her no

Her magic trembles dead in her bones. Isra doubts it could make water anyway because even dead it still hums to her of violence and war. It sings like a monster and she cannot help but think again of madness and love.

There is water just a little ways ahead. Fable interrupts her dark thoughts like he always does. This time a smile finally manages to curl her lips when she stops singing to Eik's heart with words of fire and rain. “But the stream sounds much easier than the end of the world.” And because she's this new creature defined by love and magic, she moves into the shadows to lead the way.

Like a siren of the sea, she knows he will follow.


"a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her."

Isra and a current bound for the sea

“like a wildfire, crazy like the moon, always like tomorrow, sudden like an inhale and overcoming like the tides”


For the first time she walks through the forest like a real unicorn. All the trees hang over her head in crowns of dying leaves and brittle bark. Lizards follow the black trail her horn makes when the sun pierces itself on all those wicked curves. And the earth turns to gilded gold and stardust silver where her hooves walk. Isra is bleeding magic instead of blood, wonder instead of violence, love instead of rage.

Her heart has grown legs and it's galloping through her chest. Stride after stride it does not falter across the tree-trunks of her rib bones. Step after step the only song it's singing is Eik, Eik, Eik . His name echoes like the only war-trumpet she wants to hear. Even when she steps into the cool water her heart never stops running, and singing, and trumpeting.

She looks at him, dappled by the light with water running around him, and thinks of god. How could she have ever loved the sea in a world in which there was Eik? How could she have ever wanted only to die and shed her mortality like a bad-dream?

This is how villains are made. From girls who look at boys like they're god. Isra is casting all her hope, all her love, all the things that are stopping her from turning east and bringing Raum and everyone around him to their knees, on this scarred man before her. Because she could, she knows she could. She could  be awful and terrible if there was not a song her heart would rather sing than war.

Eik's blood would not turn into flowers, bright and yellow.

Isra does not notice the way the water is turning black and pale-red around her body. All she can feel is the coolness of it and the way the current feels a little wild as it licks across her belly. Her heart is still running on four legs and leaving a wake of fire through all her insides. The splash does nothing to settle the wild ache in her, nothing to bank all the ways her magic wants out. But she smiles, bravely, as if every inch of her is not crying and screaming and promising to do terrible things for love. 

“We both are.” She says. The current takes that 'we' and carries it downstream where the sea waits open and endless. She wants to go with it, out to sea, and further than that. She wants him to come, to a place where all the things in them can get out and they can be free

But Isra knows (she knows in a hundred ways) that the moment his heart calls to her come that there is no time for them to be free. There is only time to be together, always, and for her to learn all the ways in which villains become. Because she's looking at him and there is no game, of gods or of men, in which she will lose.

She would kill them all if it means that she can move through the water towards him, as she's doing now. Isra would make gods kneel if it meant that she could drag her lips down his face like a blade for the rest of her life, like she's doing the moment she's close enough to touch him. There is no ghost she would not eviscerate, if doing so would allow her to look Eik and in the eye and open up her running soul to him.

Because that's what's she's doing now, looking at her love and asking him to run, run, run wild and feral with her. “I love you.” Isra looks him in the eye and begs him to demand anything, and everything, of her.

And still her heart is running, running, running. She doesn't think it will ever be still in her bones again.


@Eik

Isra who could be the sun

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”


There a moment, a selfish and weak moment, in which she lets her heart run and her mind follow along behind it. All her love runs in the wake of them together, like bits of golden pollen trapped on a west wind. She never stops to wonder what flowers might grow when they go to seed, or what color they might be. The only thing she cares about in that moment is running, until the world falls into the sea, and the sea into the endless black universe.

Even then she's not sure if she would want to stop running.

But then he's saying a I love you and over and Isra remembers that there is another over they have to find. And even though she wants to go over the end of world with him, she knows that this world needs a queen with wicked magic. Isra knows that Raum, that all the evil in the world, needs a blade forged just to cleave their tainted souls from their bones.

Isra also knows that she is the blade. They are blades.

So she sighs under the gentle tough of his magic and water. She leans into it like a star leaning into the smoky blue morning horizon. She dissolves into it. She comes back up on the other side, where there is only endless desert heat, and her heart given shape, and flesh, dropped beside her like an oak in a birch forest. “Then don't go back.” Her lips say to her heart, tracing the words with bloody spring water across his nose. “Stay with me. Because it will end. We will make it end.” Each drop of her magic is whispering to her of ends, of how it feels to become a god, or a blade, to shred evil from the world.

Isra would become something other than a unicorn who loves the stars, or a mare who knows how to die. She would become anything for Eik, if it meant that they would stay forever (and even longer than that).

She is not thinking of poultice, or kings, or pain when she presses herself to him. All she is thinking of it Eik, and forever, and together. Her skin feels like molten earth and her heart feels as selfish as the sun that kills every constellations. Isra is only thinking of Eik.

“I know.” She says against his hip, with teeth, with heart, with love. The tune of her voice on his skin is singing, stay, stay, stay. But what her voice isn't saying is the ways she knows why Raum won't touch her again.

Because it's the how Raum wont touch her that she's locking away from Eik even as she presses each inch of her against each inch of him.

In the end, she's more selfish, than the sun.


@Eik

Isra of the swift sea

“and I will love you until the last breath leaves your body or mine.”


There is a moment, brief and fleeting like a dying star, in which she rejoices in the way he carries her away in kisses, in touches, and in the string of cold mountain water. Each of her bones becomes an altar  for him, and each rushing pillar of blood a pyre waiting to burn. Every time he tastes away the blood and salt there is in her a heart, her soul, each singing fiber of her body a hallelujah. And in that moment she becomes, or maybe she has always been, a woman who has been a slave, a unicorn, a queen who is now looking at god.

Because what better god is there for her to praise, to bend her knee across the ore pitted earth until it is wounded, than love?

Hasn't it always been love?

Even her animal, her magic that has tooth, and claw, and hate, rejoices in the touch of all his anger (and love, and something hotter than that). When he leans against her she leans back, harder, desperately, as if she needs to use Eik to hold together all these new, strange and sharp pieces of her. And she does, she needs him, because she's too sharp and suffering for the world to hold together anymore. So she lets him hold her together even as she promises herself that tomorrow, tomorrow she'll be hard and alone and a beast of killing.

Tomorrow will come soon enough. After that, she thinks as she kisses her way slowly (painfully slowly, why does everything she do now hurt?), she can start letting that forever come swiftly and quickly upon her.

Forever, she thinks (because oh! She is thinking too much), is like the sea. Isra wants to down in it.

So she closes her eyes and lays her head against his shoulder.

And she drowns.


@Eik
(thank you for another perfect thread)