[AW] come back in through the eyes;

[Isra]

Without her shields of words and children she is adrift. Isra feels as if could be at sea as that man's gaze meets her own and he rises like a swell onto his feet. He is a tidal wave and she the deep, the stones and weeds and barnacles lost to drifts on the tides. She is as homeless as those ocean vagrants, left to sway and ebb and touch the shoreline just to be ripped away and swallowed up the dark again. When he comes closer, standing above her with his horns glinting like tines of a trident she too rises to her feet. Isra has always forgotten that the horn upon her brow could be a weapon. She doesn't know that she could cut out his eye or flay his flesh to save to her own. Isra only knows that he is a man and all the ones she has known are monsters. So she slides back into the shadow of the tree at her back and leans lightly into the knotted bark just to feel the sting of it. It lets her know she's alive. Sometime she forgets, like when she looks into the stallion's amber eyes that seem deeper than her soul and every part of the sea, that she is no ghost. The night court made her feel like nothing, like the one broken thing in a world that talked so easy of walls and fires. Her eyes, sea-foam and sunlit salt water, slide away from the pressure of the endlessness of his stare. He's too hard to hold in a look. She slides her rib-cage against the tree. Her chain sounds like a bell and it peels gently out even as dried glitter and paint fleck from her flesh like brine. The bark catches in the places where she's too thin, too fragile and weary to be real. “Was he lucky though?” Her voice is a whisper of words, a soft, silver dusting of moonlight in a world lit by hot, summer sun. “In the end she's nothing more than a pile of rock lost in the space far beyond the earth and he is more chained to the mortal realm that any man.” A man at least can die. She doesn't say the words. The strength for them is far beyond her-- the scale flaked girl who was denied her death by the sea. After her story there is so much beyond her. The words take so much from her. For each world she makes, each legend she spreads the words take from her the pound of flesh required to be summoned. Isra is suddenly exhausted, weary from the fire at her back, the way the children took with them all her hope and the way the sun seems more unending than the one that lived only on her lips. She's parched and her skin is the dried, dead dirt from her story. It's weary words that fall from her lips then and she sways against the tree, weak-kneed and as wavering as a specter of the past. “If she looked like me I'm sorry for her.” There's no beauty left in this skin of hers, gaunt as a winter tree bare of all it's leaves and and flowers. Only the echo of pain is left as if her soul has crept through like a sickness to devour this new flesh of hers. Perhaps there is more she might say, whispers of words swallowed up by the weariness of her. Isra feels like she should. She feels as if that deep endless stare of his might take them from her anyway if she but looked back up at him and away from the safety of the grass at her feet. In the end Isra isn't brave enough, real enough, to do more than close her eyes in a snowfall of glitter and pretend that he might be nothing more than any god given flesh and thought by the power of her words. Only the butterfly catch of the breaths though her lungs hint that there is more she might want to say at all. If only she had the courage. * * * * * oh you flightless bird, dead upon the ground @Lysander