Isra returns to the church-tree
“We the mortals touch the metals, the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,"
The only religion she wants tonight is the church tree singing in the wind. The only light she wants is silver-light dancing through color glass. The only patterns she wants is the black lines between one star and the next (on and on and on). The only taste she wants on her tongue is sweet clover, and lavender, and violet.
All Isra wants tonight is Eik.
So she heads to their church-tree as the first drop of rain falls fat and heavy on her nose. And when she looks up she thinks not of the rain but of the sea and how it felt caught between her teeth, and between the walls of her lungs. She thinks of moonlight too when Fable makes a canopy of wing to shield her from the rain. Somewhere she knows meteors are falling bright and violent through the dark. She can feel it, that violence in the night pulsing through her in drumbeats that make all her bones, all her muscles, every part of her ache.
The grass around her turns to pale-blue flowers, lighter than the white-wash of the sea beneath a sighing moon. Each drop of rain makes the petals shine and glimmer. It looks like the sky is raining metallic instead of sadness. Perhaps if the church-tree wasn't so close ahead she would have paused to brush a kiss against a weeping bloom. Maybe she would have gone to the lake to see if her lips shined like a half drawn constellation. Instead she only leaves the cover of dragon wing for the tinkling, chiming glass-leaves and amber bark.
Her horn seems quiet tonight, without the rain echoing in the hollowness of her, or the night wind howling weakly through the bone curls of it. Everything seems quieter when the rain sings against the strange tree and dragon scale. Even the song the meadow is singing seems hushed. Isra thinks the loudest part of the night is all this aching in her body. Her children are tangled up still, like marsh weeds, and they seem to be chanting notes through the marrow of her bones.
And Isra knows she should be worried, or afraid, or anything but this terrible wanting (and aching, and trembling).
There is a sheen of briny sweat above her eyes by the time she beds down on the moon-pale and shining flowers. If there was not the song of rain on glass and scale, the tree would echo back nothing more than the thready sound of her lungs as they start to heave, and pant, and sob in her chest.
Eik, her mind howls. She prays he is listening. The chiming tree seems to bend in the wind and pray with her.
Fable starts to keen and the sound makes her ears hurt when he tucks his head beneath the willow tree and lays it beside her bloated belly. “It won't be long now.” Isra tell him with a kiss to that salted, scaled nose of his. She can see the way it smokes across the cool planes of his face like fog (and oh it's terrible but it reminds her of Marisol and the bakery window). Isra lays her throat across that mirror of green-scale and starts to count the beats of her own heart.
It's picking up, fast little thrums of war-song and sea crash.
She wonders which of her children will be war and which will be the sea. The rain continues on as if it does not care and wants only some offering of blood and love.
Later, Eik would not remember what exactly he was doing when it started. It was no doubt something to do with acquainting himself with the citadel. He had walked the streets many times already, enough to have a detailed map in his mind of what was where and the quickest ways to get about. But knowing the shape of a thing was far different from knowing its contents. He wanted to know Denocte the way he knew Solterra-- what made her smile, laugh, cry, rage. He wanted to know how the people were most likely to flow through the streets on any given day, and what those people were like.
(Secretly, he wanted to be loved by them like Isra was. It was unreasonable and unattainable, thus it would remain a secret.)
He would remember that it started to rain. It was noteworthy because rain still felt like a blessing, even though such summer showers were common in Denocte. He loved the rain fiercely, as all desert creatures do, and it humored him to witness how quickly the streets thinned at just a little water falling from the sky. The wet stones smelled like they were trying to speak, but all he heard was the drumming of the wind and rain and the steady clop of his hooves.
And of course he would remember the way his lover howled for him. He was always listening, when they were apart. "Eik," she cried across the stormy darkness,with a force that he felt as viscerally as if she jerked a rope tied round his neck. The pain and the wanting colored her thoughts crimson-blue.
It was happening.
It does not take Eik long to get to the dreaming tree, not with love and fear urging him on. (and oh, how very similar the two are!) When he arrives his sides are heaving and slick with rainwater. "Isra." The bloated sky rumbles in the distance-- thunder, over the mountains. Do the children feel it? Is that why they want out now, so they might feel the storm for themselves? (he wonders, not without a little pride, what strange and fierce star-sea-children they've made)
"Breathe," he says, gentle yet commanding. He had witnessed childbirth before, in the other life. In that place, the herd circled defensively around mother while one or two helped talk the woman through childbirth.
There was no herd here tonight, just Eik, Fable, and Isra. The children were coming fast, too fast to summon Moira or another healer. "Just keep breathing."He looks nervously to Fable for reassurance-- she'll be okay, right?-- as though the dragon was a midwife and not... well, a dragon.
Isra with sea-touched twins
“I feel like a part of my soul has loved you since the beginning of everything. Maybe we’re from the same star.”
Eik always brings the rain with him, and sorrow, and love. He is freshwater, and dew-drops, and water steaming the heat from her skin. Her heart slows, her children slow their quickening, everything slows to the rhythm of raindrops on fevered skin and stained-glass leaves. He is everything. Isra looks at him like it's the moon falling through the dark sky (or rain on the dry desert sand) and she has been blind for all her life. Through the pain of birth she smiles at him and it's the brightest look her face has ever sculpted itself into.
How had she ever thought she loved war like this?
Between her skin her children are rushing forward into the world-- with the rain and the lighting cracking white wounds across the black sky. Isra bites the inside of her cheek. Blood blooms metallic across her tongue, and teeth. She tries-- oh she tries so very hard-- not to cry out. There is still the memory of her past like floating behind her eyes, be silent, be quiet, don't let them hear how they have cursed you.No matter how hard she tries a sob leaks out and she tucks her nose into the comfort of Eik until the smell of night-black sand soothes her.
I hope so, Fable answers Eik although what he wants to do is roar at the sky for this part of life he knows nothing of. All he can do is breath out brine and saltwater for Isra (and his twins), and hope that the sea settles her more than the soft clatter of raindrops on the glass-tree.
A rumble of thunder makes the first child break free into the world. It's not her parents that she turns her eyes to. Instead she opens them to the lighting racing across the sky, and more colors than she might ever learn of reflection patterns across the bloody ground. Her frail, young heart, aches at all that brightness. And if she smells a little like the sea already there is too much rain and sweet-grass to untangle where her ocean begins and Fable's ends. On her head a horn swings wildly (wild, wild, wild) towards where her sister is just breaking into the world.
Later her parents might remember the way the entire glass tree, and every blade of grass, and every summer flower, paused and turned its roots towards the pale girl. Later they might wonder how the lighting settled between one sister and the next. Only the rain kept up, quick as their youthful heartbeats. Now, though, there is only the way that her eyes look towards her twin and the dark sky instead of her parents. Her horn points towards the tree like a soft hello from the only language newborns now how to speak.
Isra turns to look towards Eik and her eyes are liquid with sea, and love, and amethyst. “They will be everything.” She smiles and in the look is-- they already are. And with the thunder rumbling towards the mountain and the lightning fighting a battle against the dark, Isra lays her head against the man who has always been everything.
E I K But when we sit together, close…we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.
She smiles and the thought strikes him that his whole life led to this moment. All the paths he chose led to the church tree and the woman with eyes like an undertow. Her smile breaks him and puts hims back together in the span of a heartbeat. It’s what love does to him time and time again– shatter him into pieces, and then fit them together better than before. Smaller. More concise. And each time there is a little less darkness, a little less pith.
Keep smiling at him and maybe some day you’ll hold his heart up to the sun and the light will shine right through. Like chapel windows, or something else god speaks through.
Keep smiling, keep smiling. Keep breathing.
He smiles back at her, full of sorrow (of course) that he cannot relieve her of the pain she endures. “I know it hurts,” he says I’m sorry with a brush of his lips across her forehead, as she tucks into him and sobs; keeping some things in and pushing others out. The sound digs into him like a dagger. “you’re the strongest thing I’ve ever met.” Stronger than rain, stone, earth. Stronger than any man. Probably stronger than any dragon.
And in the space that follows, all sense of time escapes him. From the strongest woman slips one little star, and then another. He could not say how long or short the birthing was, for everything moved in slow motion and yet it happened so very quickly. What he does know is that at the sight of their children’s impossible smallness, something solid and certain forms in the shadows of his mind. This is the future that once seemed so shrouded in haze and uncertain. This here before him and beside him: Eik and Isra and Fable and their children and– he once thought he needed to know the rest of the details, the where and how and why, but he doesn’t. They don’t. They made an island of themselves, and all they have to do is defend it.
This is all that matters now.
Isra looks up at him with eyes of the bluest blue, a color that reaches into his soul and gives it a stir. “They will be everything,” The twins turn to look at the sound of their mother. They’ve heard that voice before, they’ve always heard that voice, but never like this with the rain falling on their skin and the wind tugging at them to go, go, go. Then they turn to look at their father when he says “they’re perfect.” He sounds like a man on the verge of tears, even when Isra leans into him and he kisses her and smiles.
The younger filly looks content to just lay there, feeling the earth and dirt and grass beneath her, hearing god knows what in the whispers of the wind. She watches carefully as her sister begins to rise on slender, shaky legs, and then eagerly follows suit. They’re up remarkably quickly (in this proud father’s opinion) with a little encouragement from mom and dad.
Eik watches how the rain slides down the spiral of their horns. And he feels buoyed suddenly with the hope that maybe the the struggle, the sorrow, the fear and anger, maybe it isn't all in vain. Maybe he's finally done more right than wrong. But he knows it's too early to be tallying things up-- this story is just beginning. "They're going to be trouble, aren't they?" He marvels as he watches their wide, wild eyes as they wobble toward mother's belly.
@Isra ahhh I will forever and always love writing them together <3
Isra in the wild storm
“You fell in love with a storm.”
Isra, looking at Eik and her children already walking, wants to think this is all that matters. She wants her heart to feel larger than the moon, large enough to be a world of its own. And while it is large and her blood is already changing to the same beat of Eik's, there is some part of it that's black as pitch.
That part is hollow.
So very hollow.
She covers it up in the way she's brushing lines down his shoulder, and his knees, and every inch of his moon-kissed skin she can reach. There is rain on her tongue, rain and summer sweet-grass and sand (that will never leave the cracks of his skin). Even now she can still taste lavender and mint over the metallic sting of blood. Each of her legs trembles like wheat beneath the rain when she rises to press their shoulders together.
When the twins start to feed she flinches at the feel of teeth against her skin. And even though it should be the most natural feeling in the world to her, she thinks of fangs, black alleys and blood. Isra doesn't think she'll ever stop thinking those things. It's beneath the love in the way the belly of the earth is always beneath quicksand, but it's still stone-hard and ink black.
The thoughts bury themselves beneath all the love, and joy, and hope. Surely Eik knows they are there, he knows everything (even the ways she knows she's becoming something so very far from mortal, so very far from him). But when she presses her cheek to his and says, “of course,” there is only feral joy in the sound of her voice. There will be no chains, or oppressors left in the world to touch her children. Not while she still has breath, and magic, and a dragon. And fire, not while she still has fire.
Rain is falling heavier now and the wind is almost a siren-screech though the stained-glass leaves. Somewhere there's a soft rumble that the mountains are trying to swallow. There's shelter here, caught between their religion and their love, but the rain is still leaking through. Isra pauses to look up to the leaves catching what little moonlight there is cracking through the black clouds. It makes her think of arrows piercing through the night, or a storm clawing though the summer haze.
It makes her think of a hundred things that refuse to be silenced, or tamed. How could her children be anything but trouble, or wild, or gods when the world welcomes them in the soft-violent way only nature knows?
The storm is going to get worse. Fable offers the thought loud enough that Eik might hear the worry in his voice and the great ancient knowing that only beasts have.
Her children leave their meal and their shelter to streak though the howling wind like wolves. Both of them have their heads titled up to catch the salted rain-drops (from the sea, even here it's from the sea) on their tongues. They are wild and awkward as only young-souls can be. To them the storm is only a, hello.
“Just a little longer. Will you tell me what you were like as a child?” Isra whispers against Eik's lips in some strange mixture of sound and kiss (like snow, she thinks, it falls like snow between them) “Then we can take them back to the castle.” The bark of the tree is rough against her hip when she leans against it, like roots. And beneath that, below all this skin, sea, and magic that makes up Isra her heart is saying over and over again--
The thunder rumbles like a small audience of pleased gods. The thought of them being here makes Eik angry. Where were they when Delumine burned, and Solterra froze, and Terrastella and Denocte drowned? Lightning flashes and Eik hunches over his lover and his children like a bent and worn shield. As though he could make them invisible, too, the way he was in the eyes of the gods. It was better that way, he thought.
(Of course, his children would be anything but invisible. He just did not have the imagination to realize they themselves could be gods-- would be gods, and more.
They'll always be girls, in the eyes of a father.)
Eik knows the storm is going to get worse. It feels like something summoned by all the rage and passion and love (bitten-lipped love, bursting-fruit love, love enough to fill oceans and oceans and oceans and) and– he wants to laugh because no storm can touch them, not where it matters.
One of his daughters slips in the mud and falls, but before he can help her up she’s rising on wobbly matchstick legs, leaning against her sister who glares at the gnarled roots below them like she already has the song of war in her veins. He looks at Isra, and for a moment he can almost hear the war drums pulsing in her veins like a siren song: "to the sea, across the water. to stop is to drown." The rain drips lazily from her eyelashes, and the heavy drops almost seem to glow in the fierce blue of her eyes.
Was he ever a child? He blinks.
Well yes, of course he was.
Yes, it’s coming back now, through the dirty veil of age. Ashes coalesce into shapes, darkness folds to color: his mother’s face, his sisters, his brothers (not of blood but something deeper), even the vague outline of his father, blinding white against the dark grey backdrop of the sky. The sky was always grey in his memories.
He has to dig even deeper to remember what he was like. Untouched by life.
“When I was little I could never stop moving.” Of course, Eik did not move like the other children did. He did not often run wildly, soaking up the freedoms of childhood. Instead he moved most often at a walk, ponderous and ambling. Head low, like a man at the end of the trail and not a boy at the beginning. Even when standing he was never still but always swaying, ever so slowly, the way the massive oak trees did. Always echoing his namesake.
“I was violent.” The was flickers like a lantern bug, uncertain. (He does not mention how they were all violent in that place. In his mind it sounds like too much of an excuse.) “I didn’t understand anything, and I had as many questions as there are blades of grass.” That’s what his mother said, he remembered, in her dusty haygrass voice that felt (that was) for the longest time like home.
Home– the first of many to come, but… all of them so distant and disconnected when he’s here, with Isra, skin pressed to hers, closer than sunlight. And when he sees their children so small and wild and full of futures beyond his wildest imagination… his heart feels so full it hurts. Like it might just burst if he lingers too long at the beauty of it all.
And linger he does, half willing his heart to do just that– break, not for the first time, not for the last, into a hundred beautiful pieces. He’ll make weapons of some of the shards, and hang the rest from the church tree so that no one will ever forget–
“I would have been crazy for you, even then.” He kisses her shyly, like the first time, like a boy would, and all his past and future selves sing together like glass about to shatter.
Isra who smolders like the tree
“Bones know what you need. Hearts only know want.”
While he talks Isra traces the shape of his words across his chest. She writes never across the hollow curl where his shoulder starts. His words are deep as the roots of their trees. He says violent and blades and her lips pause to press hard and hot against the skin hiding his heart from the world (not not from her, never from her).
Isra knows the shape of his heart, the way it's ocean deep and large enough to sail on. His heart has always been the reason she loved him, all sunshine to chase away the winter brine of hers.
She wonders what it would have been like to learn violence before sorrow. Maybe it would have made her less of a war waiting to march--out over the mountains and across the sea where the horizon touches black space. Isra feels like she could march forever with her war-drum heart, and her hungry magic, and all this rage that the world is so dark and cruel. But then she turns to look at the deep earth of Eik's eyes and her children with lighting halos around their bodies--
She suddenly doesn't want to head towards the horizon with her drumming heart. She doesn't want to go very far at all.
Eik kisses her shyly and--
Lighting strikes a tree in the distance and she can hear the moan of it, the way the roots beneath their hooves tremble (as if she's touched it with her magic). Fable lifts his head towards the rising smoke and Isra, through their bond, can feel the way something primordial wakes up in both of them. “I would have loved you then.” And she does not say that she would have loved him as a child, or that she would have only seen him and ran towards the sea and the horizon.
It seems so long ago now, another skin, another life. Was she ever a child in any way that matters?
Isra presses her lips to his heart, and his ear, before she pulls away to call to her children. The storm is too close now to risk staying in the church tree. Now she only wants to curl up with her family like roots beneath a ancient forest.
And when the storm passes and the tree stops smoking---
She will--
The twins press their noses against her legs and she forgets all about what comes next.
