sra is thinking about blood, about the way her's feels like a storm that never wants to be caught on the mountains again. Even now as she's wandering the streets of a city that does not belong to her, with cracks of electricity running down her spine with wants and needs she has no name for, her thoughts are tumbling over and over themselves like blood tumbling through the same four caverns of her heart. Over and over again it tumbles, and tumbles, and tumbles.

Sometimes, when the day is the brightest and the war in her chest feels like a holocaust, she just wants all the things tumbling inside her to stop---

like the way the flowers stop swaying in the wind with teeth when she walks by and turns them to blooms of ruby, and opal, and tourmaline.

There is that color again-- blood. It's in everything she touches now.

The course of it changes in her veins with Fable calls out from above, there. It slows, it coagulates, it turns to diamonds falling through those caves in her heart. It hurts, it aches, and it pulls her towards the smell of spices on the wolf-wind. Isra follows it as if there is a noose around her neck pulling her up towards some place she didn't know she needed to reach. Her hooves are moving across the stone and they are singing sounds she didn't know she needed to sing.

And maybe they sound a little like I- clip- am- clop- sorry. But Isra doesn't notice that either, the same way she doesn't notice that she's turning all the spring flowers around her to stone.

How could she notice anything when, suddenly (like the way she wants it to just suddenly stop hurting), Marisol is there ringed in soft lantern light? How could she notice anything but the way the light snags on the blood ringing the Commander's eyes like it's lines of opal cutting through a sea of liquid bone?

Isra does not think Marisol will think too terribly of the way she's changing the word and making it still as death in the places where she grips it by the throat.  Or at least she hopes, or maybe prays, not.

"Marisol.” She doesn't mean for it to come out like a sacrament, like a wish, like an echo of all the cracks running through her heart. But it does. It comes out like a smoke signal, spiraling out from her in patterns of heat that make the space between them look like winter. Isra hopes that Marisol will be able to read the patterns of the looping spirals of her own name, of the way it dissolves in the black and the golden-light-- the way it spreads out to touch everything.

When she moves closer the city around them is so silent (silent as stone) that the only sound is the echo of their breaths, and the heavy clang of sorrow that is throbbing through her. Of course Marisol can hear it, Isra thinks. They have never lied to each-other-- not with their bodies, or the way they come together like swords on a battle-field of corpses.

But still, when she touches her nose to the downy softness of a sooty wing, she can't help but wish that all the tumbling shards inside her would just---

stop.

t becomes hard to remember that she is alone, and cold, and full of the taste of red, when Marisol presses their cheeks together. Isra thinks of the way her knees felt when she knelt before a thunder-bird and offered it a story instead of blood. It feels like a prayer that she knows she'll never regret, and one that her heart will keep singing like a storm even when her bones grow old, brittle and start to beg for dirt.

Marisol feels like a shadow against her, all owl wings in the dark night that are impossibly hard to feel. She feels like soot and smoke and things that Isra wants to swallow down until the taste of it crawls through the muscles in her lungs. Marisol, Marisol, Marisol-- she feels like suffocation, like drowning, like satin and silk.

She does not feel like sand and root pulled tight between teeth.

Isra looks up at the gold light glinting off copper and off brink. Her breath runs up the glass not like frost but like ivy made of dew drops instead of sunlight and seed. In it she can see patterns. But mostly she can only see the way it crawls over the frost Marisol left behind, and the way it consumes all of it until there is only glass and a reflection of heat. Is it fire Marisol feels against her throat, or a death made raw and waiting beneath a shroud of dirt-brown skin?

This embrace makes Isra feel a longing for something wild and untamed. She wants something that would take a crown between its teeth and chew, and chew, and chew until there was only smelted down gold left to spit on the ground. A shadow, Fable, passes over them and she starts to long for the sea (for the black, for the darkness that makes lying as easy as breathing).

Her voice is low, the cry of a barn owl on a foggy night as it finds a lone mouse. There is a hunger in it, a nameless and deep belly roar. “Tell me I am not alone in this.” In fire, in hunger, in feeling like a monster, in feeling like she should be buried in the dark. Isra doesn't know how to say the words but all she knows is that she feels terrible, and monstrous, and as horrible as a god.

Couldn't they be gods together-- if only for a little while?

The glass before her ripples and grows black as death, black as the endless night. It's black long enough for her to blink and tuck her head tighter against Marisol so that the Commander will not see. And then it is only glass again and her breath is painting more vines of fire over the clear surface. Isra is glad that all the fog of her fire blots out the reflection of them, of two bodies bending and breaking (but never being remade).

She can smell the brine on Marisol, the blackness of the salted deep. But Isra only thinks it's her own sorrow leaking through her skin like a beast that has forgotten how to be tame. Because all Isra can taste is her sorrow leaking through like a sea without a bottom.

It's enough to drown an entire city.

er heartbeat is telling her a story when it stutters and reshapes itself to Marisol. It's a tangled web of sea-great sorrow, and fury, and rotten fruit that tastes so sweet when shared in a kiss. Each word of it inks red and hot against the inside of her muscles, and the hollow places of her heart that have known the sea. The words run together like tides and the shore. Isra does not think that the marrow of her bones has ever heard a sweeter, more violent song.

It is a lullaby she will sing her children someday, when she tells him of all the ways a heart works to crack open things like bones, and bodies, or mortality.

“Do not pretend to misunderstand, Marisol.” Isra almost wants to pull away from the brush of a soft muzzle (too soft to smell like sun, sand, and root). She almost wants to catch a ray of moonlight on her horn and turn it into a double tipped sword with one point at each of their throats. She almost, almost, almost-- there are a hundred almost wants running broken and  jagged through her storytelling blood. But in all the end all that comes out is another touch of their muzzles together.

Isra thinks that they touch like weeds by the sea, salted, bent and full of seeds that will never grow honeysuckle and pears. She inhales the moment, the sea, the sorrow, the want. She drags it on, because she knows what's about to come out, what words her blood-story is going to say. The kiss she gives to Marisol's ear is a whisper of skin, hair, and something else.

“It's not your help that I want.” Maybe once, she wants to say, maybe once she would have wanted nothing more than help or love. But now there is a terrible magic, and an awful hate running along with the blood-story. Now her heart has learned to beat in just that same way as Marisol's. Her touch has learned about the way Marisol smells just like the sea, even though when they touch it can feel impossibly hot. “It was never only help that I wanted.” Isra inhales, but nothing more than another kiss of nose to ear comes out.

I wanted a friend. She wants to say but the words never form.

I wanted someone who knew how to ache like me. I wanted something fierce and wild against my skin. Those words do not form either, nothing does. She feels terrible, and sick, and like a monster. The glass turns pitch black again and her eyes sting a little without the shine of copper.

Isra pulls away, because she knows that she should (even though she still doesn't want to). “I'm going to be a mother.” Later she won't know where the words came from or why she said them at all. They are not the words her heart or her story wanted to say. She doesn't want it to cut the way it does and her heart stutters with the sound the words make echoing against her teeth. It starts to beat it's own song (and Isra starts to hate it for the melody).

Isra inhales all the salt and the pitch in the window.

I want--

 forgiveness.

But those words don't come out either. Her teeth hurt with the effort to hold them back, and the knowing that she cannot go back now. She can never go back. Didn't she tell Eik once, forward until the end of the world? A part of her is saying to turn away, to go back, to do anything but stare at Marisol like she will tell her the secret to holding in all these awful, rotten pieces of herself.

Marisol is not the one who did not do her job. She never was.

It's always been Isra.

here are times when she remembers what it feels like to be made of sorrow, and rain, and misery instead of flesh or bone. It had a weight, all that heaviness, like stones piling up in her soul and bits of earth pulling her down into the rot, and the blackness. She remembers the salt of it, the brine, the way seaweed could form itself into chains thicker and sharper than steel.

But now, beneath that, Isra knows what it is to feel like magic, like danger, like a wildcat.

And when Marisol shifts, for a moment no more than a beat of her heart, Isra remembers. Perhaps if she were not used to watching for the cracks that bloom so lovely, so perfectly across the planes of Marisol she would not have seen it. But it's there like a solar flare reflected across the surface of the sea. It looks like rage, and sorrow, and heartbreak. It looks like it wants to devour her in the same way the sea has ever wanted to.

Her own magic and sea-touched wildness answers back. It's a flash of dark blue tide, of monsters lurking beneath the pearl-white crest of a wave. When the thing in Marisol that leaks brine and weed instead of sorrow looks at it the thing in Isra curls its lip back and flashes sharp shark teeth. There is sorrow in her, always, but now it's tainted and poisoned by war, and suffering, and hunger.

And then they are heartbreak again, god-girls looking at each other with a different kind of hunger and violence. Isra does not step closer when the rusty pain of Marisol's voice makes her shiver like a touch instead of sound. In her chest, beneath all the cracks and scars and salt-water, her heart is screaming to beg forgiveness, to say I loved him first and I was lost.

Even if she could take it back (she doesn't want to) she would never give up the two fierce sea-stars thriving inside her. So she only lifts her head, like there is something more than a bone sword hanging from her brown, and says with all the coarse of a storm-sea (and all the violence), “Eik”. She says nothing else.

Isra knows she cannot share here all the ways in which she loves-- likes pieces of a puzzle that fit closer than any root has ever fit in the dirt. Nor can she say, I loved him by the snow-light and you by the sea-torn land. She knows with a terrible knowing, the same way she knew that she had become a waiting weapon, that there is nothing more to say.

They are too fierce, too wild, too full of gnawing grinding teeth for words, words, words. “I'm sorry.” Her heart quivers like a dying thing at the feel of the words slamming against her teeth. All the cracks of her yawn open like beasts, like lions, like chasms at the bottom of the sea.

“I'll always be sorry.” When she walks away, and her dragon howls out a sorrowful dirge as he flies home, Isra cannot help but look back one time. In that look there is nothing of good-bye. There is only a wanting she fears will never die, never fade, never stop hurting.