[AW] little ghost, so forgotten and small

[Isra]

The market is strange to her, too loud and full of life, too bright with colors. She's too used to the darkness, to the silence broken up by nothing more than the ebb and flow of her cold, frozen breaths. Everything here to too alive for her, Isra of the sea-- the girl who did not want to live her life at all.  Deep in her memories, locked away in a chest a certain blackness rattles and shakes. It wants her to recall, that something, to remember what life it was exactly that she didn't want to live. But she only remembers that brine sting of the sea in dreams and what came before that in flashes that are too quick to grasp. They flutter past her eyelids quick as dragonfly wings, shining in the way that blood shines under the moonlight.  A horse yells to another, shrill and demanding, and she forgets what forgotten thing she was trying to remember in the first place.  She digests the smell of this place, rank with sweat despite the coolness of the night. It's a heavy enough smell in her nose that she grinds her teeth together so that she might swallow the soft hint of jasmine and apples that hang like thin, fragile webs of mist in the air. It burns, this place and her eyes are white and wide with fright as she strays back, back, back to the shadows of the stone walls. There she tosses her horn into the blackness before her, tucked away behind the tents and lively horses, to see what monsters she might flesh out.  Already she wants to run back to her corners of heavy dust and the thick silence that soothes her like a hot, summer sea. But her stomach rumbles again and her skin stings where it's pulled too taunt against her ribs and the jut of her hip bones. So on she goes, the past chasing her like a miasma nipping at her heels, on and on and on until there is a barrels of apples that has been left forgotten at the corner of a table.  Quick as a snake she darts for the food, her stomach rumbling like a dragon underwater.  But as she moves from the shadows the moon glints on her horn until she sparkles like obsidian and the scales of her belly glitter like a starlight sea.  Isra knows that too much of her is in the light now, it stings.  And she can feel for the first time, like something that hasn't been forgotten. For the eyes on her (from where she cannot tell in the inferno of her fear) are white hot and her skin shivers like a million spiders are crawling all over her. She would rather be that tidal wave of memories locked away deep in the dark of her mind-- something left to fade away and die alone.  She's too afraid too look, to seek out those burning, predator eyes. So she tries to grab an apple anyway (her hunger is too ravenous to be soothed with fear) before sinking back into the blessed and black shadows of the wall.   * * * * * down, down i'm still drowning