[AW] come back in through the eyes;

[Isra]

Isra is fresh from the fire when she finally makes it to the festival. Her lashes are heavy with soot and ash and her tears have made riverbeds from the thick gray that looks like stone in the hollows of her cheeks. Frothy sweat clings to her shoulders like sea-foam and the leaves tangled in her mane could be seaweed for how dark they've grown through all the lands she's ran across. On and on she ran, ignoring the frantic beat of her heart how it pleaded to stop, to rest. Even her lungs, when they burned like acid in her chest, could not stop those wild legs of her from running until they broke. A desert clings to that hollow of her spine. Swamp mud clings to her legs and swallows up that bell-chime rattle of her slave chain. Even the stars cling to her. Though she hates the jasmine and spice of that distant night court and all it's demons, she can't quite get the hint of it off her skin.  It's only the sight of the festival, of the peace of horses with flowers upon their brows and glitter on their skin, that stops that frantic fleeing of her legs. She's still cautious as she joins them, afraid of what monsters might lurk behind these faces that look so much like hers. Only the children don't send her slipping back for those soothing shadows of the forest. They braid flowers into her hair and draw long swooping swirls of glitter across the places of her body that look too tired and battered to be lovely. Soon she's no longer that sweaty, battered and smoke-stained ghost of a girl. The children make a mermaid of her, a creature of scales and flowers. Isra looks more like some fantasy of the deep with the way she sparkles like the sea as the sky turns dusky. They even paint her chain to hide the rust and horror of it. It shines like the moon and rings like a falling star as she lays down to rest in the sweet summer grass. Perhaps it's because their lack of pretense that for that first time since she drowned in the sea that words and images boil and seethe on the tip of her tongue. There is a sea of stories in her, risen up from that locked box of her past. They push and push and push at her lips. And so she says, neck arched out to touch the nose of each child that she welcomes closer to her throne of grass and flowers. “I have a story to tell you.” Gone is that ghost of a girl and she whispers like every word she says is secret. The grass under her bends with the breeze of her breath and for a moment the meadow seems hushed, poised on the inhale of her lugs. All the children resting around her wait, bodies quivering with that wildness that grows in Isra's smile as she looks way out over their heads. She looks as if she has spotted something grand and beautiful that only she can see, something as elegant as it is tragic. “Once there was a girl and a sea and they both lived in a world covered in monsters and devils. There was very little kindness in this world, for it was as harsh and brutal as the sun that ruled over it. The sun never faded, never faltered and everything in that world was dull with dust and drier that any desert in Novus. Only the sea could withstand the sun and the girl often went to him for just a moment of respite from the deadly heat of her homeland.” Her voice is nothing more than a springtime breeze, a hint of warmth in a sea of ice. Only her eyes are loud and they blaze with her words. An entire galaxy could be seen in that ocean-blue if someone met her gaze at just the right angle.  And in the pause of her story her eyes look up, meeting a gaze that was not there when she started. She smiles, forgetting for a moment that she is afraid of the older horses of this world, afraid of the terrible potential of them all. That smile seems to beckon and the scales on her sides seem to shine just a little brighter, a little bolder.  For a moment, as she waits for them to join her gathering or continue on to the blazing bonfires, Isra seems as if she could be a siren.  – as if she could be of that sea that lives now only in the magic of her voice.  * * * * * fire in the water is the body of our love @Acton & anyone else