Isra and her warship

“It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail."

For over a year the boat as waited and rotted halfway to the lake and halfway from the sea. The hull of it has tasted winter and the prow of it (on which a kelpie screams for blood) has tasted the sweet of seed and spring. All the barnacles have started to turn to moss as the wood started to peel back from the bones of the hull. 

For over a year the boat has waited there-- dying. 

Perhaps it was waiting for me to notice it, to realize that there was this thing in me that was waiting and rotting right alongside it. And I'm noticing it now: the way I wake with pearls of sweat across my chest, the way that I feel like I'm suffocating no matter how deeply I breathe the spiced air of my city. There has always been this blackness inside, I know it as well as I know the pattern of scales across my sides, but now I can feel it spreading like moss and pulling away from the bones of me like mealy wood. 

Fable's wing is casting strange shadows in the moonlight glow around me as we walk. I can see stories in in, that darkness cut through with silver-glow. I can see the ocean in it too, the way it rises and crests over the copper grass and the smoky flowers my magic has made. And if it cuts through my shadows like it's trying to swallow it whole I try, as I always do, not to notice. 

Eik. I call as I touch my nose against the cool rotten hull. It's like I'm etching his name into the marrow of this dead boat with it's ancient brine. Like by naming it with the chambers of my heart I can  soften the death of it, make it lovely or anything but black and worn. 

Eik. His name, cried out in tomes of devastation and wildness. I know it'll remind him of all the nights I wake up screaming and panting with magic ripping out of my skin in waves, and waves, and waves. Maybe it sounds like chain-mail in my mind, his name. Maybe it sounds like fire blazing in our room after I've turned everything to birch by only a blink of my sleep-hungry eyes. 

I'm still pressing my lips against the rot hard enough that I can feel the bits of mold creeping into the cracks between my teeth. If I had forgotten that somewhere past the horizon there is suffering going on endlessly, the feel of all that parasitic wood would have reminded me.

But of course I'm nearly god now and all that rot doesn't stay rot very long. And that horizon hiding suffering--

I'm going to conquer it.

The rot turns to gleaming cypress that when it catches the moonlight makes comets dance across the corner of my eyes. The kelpie sheds her sharp teeth for a a dragon's mouth and a monster's wings. A flag once tattered and worn flies black as pitch and shines as if starlight has been woven in the canvas. Everything about the ship seems to sigh, like a mighty prayer from the belly of dead trees that never remembered what it felt like to root in the spring-damp loam. My own magic sighs in my belly and that sounds not like relief but like more, more, more. 
 
At first, when Eik comes I don't want to turn away from my wicked ship made for war to look at him. I don't want to see the planes of his face outlined in moonlight below the watchful eyes of the mountains. I don't want to see the way his eyes seem older and older each day. 

But then I remember that across that horizon there was a rumor of underworld gods walking between the thrones of mortal men. And when I look at Eik with magic blazing sun-hot in my eyes... 
I know I will take that kingdom from them too if it means I can keep this man forever. 

Let him see it in my eyes, I think, let him see how I will raze the world to keep him. 

I am not a gentle god, not anymore. 



@Eik

Isra who is suffocating

“what a wicked thing to do"

There was a way my soul moved once: ice, and frost, and mist. Below my skin it had felt like the shallow sea under a high-noon sun. I thought it was nothing more than a golden ghost of salt and brine shifting in me over and over, a tide reaching for the moon hour after hour. And I had loved it, that ghost of a golden sea, and the way it roiled inside me with sorrow, and loss, and melancholy.

But looking at Eik as he moves through the moonlight, with the sliver clinging to the curl of his lashes like snow, I cannot help but realize my soul doesn't feel the same anymore.

It's moving differently now.

My soul is wild, and feral, and full of love enough to drown the world. I love the way it feels below my sea-kissed skin. I leave my ship to go to him, this man that makes my soul run, and rush, and ripple like the great river. I will always go to him.

“Yes.” I paint the word across his brow. The touch burns my skin, smolders deeper than that, it makes my soul reach for the moonlight. I hope he can feel it, the way it's him and not war flaming beneath my skin and giving up snowy ash. “I asked him to stay, for Denocte and our children but he wouldn't.” The words that I'm worried we'll need him don't come as easily as they should, I feel guilty enough already.

I press into his shoulder and this time when I look back at my war-ship it seems like something softer, something made for sailing to the end of the world and beyond that. It looks like it was made for the sea between our souls. His mane still has soot and jasmine clinging to it when I pull it between my teeth. I a fold a knot into it and when I pull away it hangs on his neck like another link of the chain wrapping around my leg. A promise, that's what I call it, a promise.

“Part of me doesn't want to go.” Each word tastes like salt and fermented fruit, like bitterness, like fear. I've gone to war before, because I had too, and it felt nothing like this. This is a tear in my strange moving soul, a rot I can't hold back anymore. It's all black spaces between moonlight and starlight.

I should have gone sooner than this. I should have gone before I loved.

My lips must feel like embers against his when I breath my fears into him like air. “But if I don't go back... If I don't free all the other slaves suffering as I did...” I hope it doesn't choke him, I couldn't bare it. But I know my love surely feels like violence, like a curse, like everything sweet that kills. “There is no one else who can.” And it might not be choking him--

But--

I'm suffocating.



@Eik

Isra and the oak tree

“You only need one man to love you. But him to love you free like a wildfire, crazy like the moon, always like tomorrow, sudden like an inhale and overcoming like the tides. Only one man and all of this.”

Always there has been this thing between us that has no real need for word, and sound, and language. Part of me knows it as love. And part of me, the part that is all endless magic and saltwater, knows it as more than just love. What lives between us, what thrives between us, is more than love. There is star-stuff, and galaxies, and religions older than moonlight, in all the tiny spaces between us.

To call the look in my eyes, the way my eyes blaze bluer than a shallow sea on a white shore, love--  

It is like calling desperation hope.

Desperation is all I can feel now as I lean against him with a war-ship and a dragon behind us. It's all I can feel when I think of the battle ahead of us. It's in knowing that I'm going to breathe in fury each time I great the dawn on the deck of our ship. It's in the goodbye our hooves are whispering through the roots below, the way it might not reach the roots of our church-tree. It's in the way my heart trembles beneath my skin, and between us, at the ache in both our souls when we think of our children.

But I think of thousands of other children who wake up each day, and go to bed each night, with fear blinding them like they are living only in the center of a lightning bolt. I think of them and I do not ache as much, I do not feel like it's desperation instead of blood running through my veins.

Instead everything feels like saltwater when I think it, it feels like ichor. Somewhere the planets are sighing in the same notes as each organ beneath my rib-cage. Somewhere they are singing the song of this thing between Eik and I that is more than love.

And when he presses his cheek to my horn, to my hungry spiral of bone, and speaks of weapons---

When he does it every planet, and every star, and every god I will devour, shifts like dust above our heads. It all becomes meaningless. I wonder if he can hear the wind through my horn still. I wonder if he can still hear the song of it, the drumbeat and the lament. I wonder if he knows that I do not want to make him a weapon with that desperation called hope. I wonder if he knows how I will raze the world over and over again until every phoenix in it is dead to keep him from needing one to find his way back to the shore.

But instead, because Eik has never asked anything of me, anything, I press my cheek to his and my neck to his knot. I do not have it in me to deny him anything. I would stay if he asked it of me. “I dreamt of you before, when I lived in the world we are going to take.” Beneath my cheek my pulse flutters like a hummingbird, like I can feel all the fear I used to live by, all the desperation. “You would come to me in the moonlight and the frost. You would promise freedom.” Before the sea, before death, before this one last chain around my leg--

Before it all there had been the warrior with scars, and sorrow, and hope--

There has always been Eik.

At my hooves, the dirt pulses like a living thing. Like the magma and the loam are breathing. Everything rusted, and old, and worn down by the gods, and the sea, and time, everything turns to silver and oak. I could make nothing for him that is not made of silver and oak, moonlight and frost, freedom and wisdom. My magic begs me to pick up the halberd, to show him the way it whistles in the wind, the way it's sharp enough to cleave time apart. It begs me.

But I only stare at him and leave it on the ground, waiting. I'm always only staring at him, even when I'm sleeping, and dreaming, and telling everyone I'm going to war. I only ever see Eik, and oak, and silver.

I do not wonder if he'll notice the acorn made of sea glass on the handle. I do not wonder if he'll see it is the color of my eyes, of our daughters' eyes, of Fable's eyes. Just like I only see him I know that he only sees us. It's always been us. I kiss him with that thought in my head and nothing of war. My ship seems like a ghost behind me waiting to cross over. It seems almost trivial.

“For breaking chains.” I'm still kissing him when I say the words with his halberd glimmering like a pale star in the cage of our shadows. When I pull away it's only to press my lips to his chest, to that place where his heart beats for me and our connection greater than love. This place, this hollow notch in his chest, is one of my favorite parts of Eik.

And when I say, “this is for finding your way back to me,” I am speaking to the heart that has always found me no matter the form I take.




@Eik

Isra who will always beg for this

“He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

This has always been my favorite place, where our souls and our minds tangle up like weeds. I can hardly feel his skin beneath my lips and my heart is thrumming loud enough to stop against my bones. Here there is only the vision of me, of him, of each sweet aching part of life sketching out constellations in us. I dance between them, with dead butterflies caught in my teeth instead of roses and stones. If I am smiling, it's not a shape my form knows how to take (it's too bright, moon-bright).

If I am anything but his, it is not a shape my soul knows how to take.

Beneath this version of us, the sea of memories is nothing more than a universe of our creation. Here we are gods and lovers. Here I am not the only one who watches time flicker on by (like a hundred dying, falling stars) and never touch my skin.

Here Eik is forever. Sometimes I think I will die here, tangled up with him in the heart and the form, until our bones turn to seed and dust.  

But as it always does the rest of the world leaks in. There is Fable trying to turn his head away because this is the one place he cannot reach me. There is my ship whispering by the sound of its sails in the wind. There is the glimmer of a halberd begging me to run my horn along the brutal edge of it.

And there is a war waiting for us. There is always a war.

I can feel his skin now, as I run my lips along it like he's the only map I want to read. I can feel his heartbeat, as steady as a desert sun. “No.” To the thing below his skin I whisper it, that thing that will always be mine and mine alone. No one has known that thing beneath his skin as well as I do (as well as I always will. Forever). Part of me whats to tell him that there is no end besides the ones we make. I want to braid and eternity of knots into his mane, one for each soul we will save by fighting this war only we, only I, have the power too.

How perfect could the world be, if the gods were not all so terrible? What could it be if the gods loved something other than themselves?

We will see. Fable answers the questions I'm still too mortal to discover. There has not been a time where I did not know how old his soul was, between the two of us he has always been wiser (and kinder). And I know Eik can hear it too, all the dark parts of my soul and the thoughts it thinks when it gives up pretending to be nothing more than a queen in a moonstone castle.

It still feels further away than it should-- this fate. Here with my knots in his mane, and my lips to his skin, and our souls pressed together like flower petals between pages, there is only this moment. The calm before the storm.

And it is any wonder then, why I grab that knot between my teeth and pull him into the belly of my warship?

Is it any wonder at all, that I use teeth, and lip, and beg him to make me feel like something mortal again?

Is it any wonder at all?




@Eik