[AW] come back in through the eyes;

[Isra]

“And if she forgets him and falls in-love with the stars? Maybe fate made her for the stars and not the sea.” She doesn't notice him shifting as she whispers with her eyelids pressed together tight enough to sting. The only thing she notices is the way words burn on her lips, strange and too loud as the music around them lulls. It feels as if the world has silenced around them, frozen but for the hushed yet heavy sounds of their tangled breaths. She wonders in the ebbed noise if he might hear the frantic, fearful thrum of her heart over the steady inhale and exhale of her fragile lungs. “What purpose will a tethered power serve him then?” Part of her wonders if she says the words at all or if they are mere echoes of the broken, sad hum of that frozen organ betwixt her ribs. “Love is a fickle, fragile thing. Yet they say it belies all power, all hope.” It's her heart speaking after all. That poor abused thing making words out of heartbeats and forcing them out like bile between her lips. Perhaps he is an old, jaded thing who talks with an uncertainty that hangs on him like ice upon the summer sea. But would he be as happy to die as she? Would he see it as freedom to let loose his words and soul and blood from the cage of flesh that chains them both so? If she dies she wants her soul to turn to dust with her bones, free at last to fetter way like a million fireflies on the breeze. When he speaks again, the timbre of his uncertainty is enough to make her open her eyes. She watches him like the sea washes upon the shore. Her gaze touches his then washes away, back to the shadows, like a tide. Isra isn't brave enough to hold him in those sea-blue eyes. But she's brave enough to step away from the tree. Pieces of her tail cling and tear where they were caught against the knotted, sharp bark. She doesn't notice the sting of her hair. She doesn't know to miss the strands that made up one of the only lovely features of her. “Freedom.” The word comes as quick as a blink and it cracks with a certainty that is harsh against the tender softness of her parched lips. Freedom from this unholy skin she does not yet know well. Freedom from fear and sadness. Freedom from those black memories that seep like oil into the cracks and crevices of her soul and refused to contained any more than sea refuses to dry up to desert sand. Her hooves move almost unbidden closer to him. It's as if every inch of her strains towards that muted music and the freedom of the wide open fields that stretch out on the edge of her horizon. She strains as if she wonders what freedom those wicked points of  his antlers might offer. What freedoms might he offer with those eyes deeper than the dark parts of the sea? Might he offer what the ocean refused to give up? And when she speaks again it's nothing more than more whispers offered close enough that she tastes the musk and forest darkness on his skin in-between the syllables of her words. “But to gain a wish I would have to find a moon-flower of my own.” She doesn't say that she could steal the flower, something about the soft broken innocence of her suggests that she is not such a low mortal as that. She's ruined and broken but innocent yet, ignorant to the ways of the world in places not yet swallowed up by blackness and sin. “Would you make a wish?” Surely he could find a moon-flower, this man who smells like the most ancient of thickets. Isra offers her nose to him then. A touch for a wish as is for a moment she has forgotten she is not the moon or the sea, forgotten that she is nothing at all but cursed. * * * * * slip, slip, slip through your veins  @Lysander