"Within every solar system of the soul lies a plan of what truth is”
Isra doesn't remember the moment the mountain snow turned instead to marble beneath her hooves. Nor does she recall exactly when the night sky gave way to pillars of cracked, white stone upon which dead ivy grew. The temple curling around her, like a ghost, feels like it appeared out of nowhere. One moment she was prowling though the sleeping forest trying to get rid of the itch of violence that kept her awake. The next moment she was walking through the empty halls of an old temple.
Snow still drifted lazily around her and the shadow of Fable still cut through the moonlight like a blade. Her dragon saw the temple but he never warned her because a comet shooting across the sky caught his attention instead. The stars were always brighter in the sky than in the forest. He doesn't understand why his unicorn wanted to climb the mountainside when he could have just carried her.
Unicorn are strange creatures, he thinks. But he still loves her so.
Under the shadow of her dragon, Isra finally looks out from her own thoughts itching down her spine like vines, and finally notices the pillars rising around her like bones. There are candles flickering on hollow shelves, although when she tries to find hoof prints in the snow there isn't even a hint of a single one. She shivers and she doesn't know if its from the cold or from the way that the candle-light makes her feel so alone.
Isra could be the only one left in the world. The snow swallows up every sound, even the sound her lungs make when she exhales curls of mist and heat from her nose. She moves closer to an altar, and she looks behind her just once to make sure that she's leaving a trail in the snow. She is.
Hellebore is blooming in pots, black and purple, and she wonders if she would be saved from madness if she ate a petal. Or would she just die, a sacrifice to this strange temple in the sleeping forest? She brushes her nose against a petal just to see if the flower makes a sound. It whispers against her skin, although she cannot understand the language of it.
Someone is coming, Fable interrupts because he knows Isra is still itching even as the snow gathers across her spine.
When she turns towards her trail of prints in the snow, the candle closest to her sputter and dies. The moonlight seems brighter with the loss of it, cool silver reflecting off each snowflake falling around her. She doesn't try to say anything, she only exhales more curls of heat and waits.
These scars long have yearned for your tender caress
To bind our fortunes, damn what the stars own
The night would be lonely if Felume didn’t feel so close to him. Where once there had been endless blue was now shrouded by the dark cloak of night, sprinkled tastefully with glittering stars and the moon, hanging full and low, providing enough light to assure him safe passage. Kratos mirrored the image stretched out above him, resembled the image of his God – and he likes to think that He looks down on him now, His eye the moon which guides his way.
Somewhere deep inside his soul stirred, scratching at its cage and biting at the steel bars that contained it, yearning for something it did not have. Kratos wasn’t sure what that thing was, but he was certain that it was the reason he had traveled beyond the comforts Denocte had effectively offered him. Sometimes the dull, empty ache would creep its way into his heart and sour the wretched fool’s mood even more than it usually was, to the point where not even Pryna could help pull him from its dredges. Oh, she knew precisely why his heart ached so, but fate kept her lips sealed. All she could do was be there for him and offer what advice she was able.
Turning down one path that led to two more, Kratos paused, taking note of the path carved out down one of them. Company was the last thing the unicorn thought he wanted, and so he made to continue down the one yet to be disturbed, until a flicker of light beckoned for his attention somewhere in the distance. His eyes strained to make out the distant figure and the firelight which dimly illuminated them. He wondered if it might be Azrael, the stallion whose path he had crossed upon first crossing the mountains, but it was impossible to tell at this distance. Far more curious than he had been that first time, he pressed on, using the already hollowed out path that he could only assume had been made by them.
Above them, something flew in circles – something big – and Pryna looked critically toward the sky, lilac eyes growing wide when she spotted the being responsible. A monolith of a dragon, the likes of which she hadn’t seen in an excruciatingly long time, surveyed the mountains like a sentry from above. The simple occurrence of seeing another dragon makes her want to call out, but for now she kept reluctantly silent. They couldn’t be sure whether this one was friend or foe, but Pryna knew that if it was the latter, then she and Kratos would already be gone. The unicorn himself eyed the beast cautiously, but like his bonded, he assumed that if the dragon meant any trouble, they would have been descended upon by now.
Drawing closer to the temple, Kratos was surprised to see that there was only one standing within it. For a moment he was almost positive that it wasAzrael, but unlike him, the stranger standing up ahead wore a horn upon their brow. The gentle light reflected off of the bay’s speckled belly, glorious shades of blue and green that were reminiscent of a dragon fly’s wings. At first he wondered if it might simply be a trick of the light, but as he drew nearer, it became obvious it was anything but. Were it not for the dying candlelight around her, he wasn’t sure he would have seen her at all enshrouded in shadow as she was.
“Pardon us.” He speaks, and breaks the eerie silence that had encapsulated the mountains outside of the crunch of snow underfoot. “I was only curious what a dragon might be protecting so far into the mountains.”
"In the heart of the hollow where the dark pools are;”
The temple feels almost alive again the moment the stallion joins her. The candles no longer look like lone sentries against the dark winter night. When she looks behind him to another marble pillar it looks less like bone and more like a treasure carved into something precious. Around him the temple seems to sigh, like a monolith of a god that has just remembered how to breath.
Isra smiles, the temple no longer feels strange. It feels like fate.
“No pardons needed.” There is a touch of laughter on her voice, a whisper of all the things she misses feeling. Tonight she doesn't feel like a queen, only like a unicorn full of magic (a little wild, a little free). When she walks closer the marble turns to sapphire in small half-moons in the places where she stepped. Each bit of stone looks like a piece of the night sky fallen to earth.
She's not wondering what this temple was for anymore.
It was made for this, for strangers meeting in the night, for apologies and strangeness. This temple was made for living, not for worshiping. The lesson is one she hadn't realized she had forgotten.
Isra tilts her head at him, tracing the curl of his horns and the shine of silver on him that reminds her of a constellation trapped in a cloud. “Fable might look like he's protecting me but really he's mostly watching the stars above the distant sea.” Her gaze looks at the small dragon who is with him and something in her heart aches at the thought that Fable would never been able to join her in this temple made for living. Dragons belong in the sky and unicorns belong to the earth.
Her breath is still curling from her nose like smoke when she reaches towards him in a greeting. Moonlight catches and snags like a silver net on her horn. “I'm Isra.” Tonight she decides to become Isra the traveler in the night.
Isra wants to be just another unicorn hiding in the snow pretending it's innocence and not fury blooming in her heart.
These scars long have yearned for your tender caress
To bind our fortunes, damn what the stars own
There are many words that could describe the woman as she turns to face him, but one stands above the rest as he looks on at her; ethereal. Something about her seems otherworldly, and yet impossibly ordinary at the same time. The feeling isn’t one he can remember experiencing nor thinking in the past, and so for the time being he plays it off on a simple lack of proper rest as well as the anomalous temple.
Pupiless eyes track skyward as she speaks of her dragon, looking on as he wound effortlessly through the sky as though it belonged to him. Perhaps it did, in a way, for who would dare to cast somebody like him from it?
“I cannot fault him,” Kratos speaks as he returns his glacial gaze back to her, “I’ve always felt they covet some kind of secret from us. Maybe he’ll be the one to finally uncover it.”
As she reaches out toward him, there was a moment of hesitation from Kratos before he shifted to return her kindred form of greeting. This land was different than the one he had come from, foreign in its customs, he had quickly learned, but he did his best to acclimate to them. “I am Kratos,” he returns with a terse nod of his head, “A pleasure, Isra.” From atop the first gentle curve of his horn came a trill as Pryna crept further down, bright eyes of lavender looking from him to Isra before she puffed up a little, attempting the best smile she could conjure, and from Kratos’ lungs escaped a gentle sigh. “And this is Pryna. We are new to Denocte, simply trying to find our place in this nook of the world.”
When he speaks Isra forgets about the stars her dragon is flying below, and all the stories caught in the black space between them. She almost follows his gaze up past the marble walls and the low-burning candles. Instead she is caught on the way his sides shine like a nebula has been caught in his dark skin. Isra cannot help but think that he glitters with the night while she, queen of a stardust court, only shines with the glimmer of sea-scale and rusted iron.
If it werent for the way that her magic feels like a dream caught on the web of her veins she would feel like a lie before him.
It's almost after too long a pause that she finally traces the mapline his eyes made into the sky. There she pauses and wonders at the way Fable dissolves into the black at the same time he's ringed in starlight like a lost, dead god. “I don't know that he would tell me if he did find it,” Her voice is full of something like love when she looks back at the stallion and wonders if his dragon is as troublesome as Fable can be.
Young dragons are something she never read about in stories. They were always acient and full of knownledge enough to devour a hundred civilations. Isra still feels lost in the rasing of a young dragon. She worries that all the hate, and fury, and fear living deep in bones is ruining his innocence. (and sometimes she's so happy that it's saltwater and fish in his belly instead of fire).
Pyrna puffs up into a look she knows well and Isra laughs. The sound of it echoes across the stone, across the saphirre blooming rings around her hooves, like a wish falling through the small silence between them. She laughs and it feels like coming home, like she's been lost to fear for longer than she ever knew. Her skin itches with the freedom of it.
“Welcome then, Kratos. Welcome home.” A candle flickers at her back and freezes there when her magic turns it to a glass scuplture of a caught flame. The marble starts to shimmer more than marble should, like silver merged with diamond. “And have you found your nook yet?” Something in her eyes shines too brightly, too wisely, than a mere unicorn's eyes should shine. Her eyes shine like the sea as she watches him-- dark, endless, and a little like a storm caught.
