[AW] the stars failed to guide me home;

[Isra]

It's takes her longer than it should to hear the stallion move towards her. Her heartbeat swallows up all the sound of the mountains. The sound of it rattles off her rib-cage and echoes like a waterfall in her ears. It feels as if it is screaming, the way it pounds against her like a living thing. She clenches her teeth together against the violence of her fear, pinching the edge of her lips between her teeth just to feel something at all. Just to know that she's alive and not buried beneath rock and rubble. Finally she can hear him between the hummingbird sounds of her panic. A rustle of leaves, the skitter of a rock down the mountainside, the easy way he breathes like a man unafraid of the summit above that might slide down to crush them down to dust. Isra presses her eyes closed hard enough that pain sparks like stars in the blackness shrouding her gaze. In that darkness she hopes and prays again to any gods left that he might be nothing more than a stray elk that smells like somewhere so far away she has no name for it. She prays that he is not a man, a monster, another creature to wield lash or word. Her hope falls only on gods that have long since lost any fondness for the feral, broken Isra. When he clears his throat and speaks she cannot help the way her eyes flutter open like the softest of sighs. For a moment she relaxes a fraction, his voice is soft enough to be merely man instead of monster. That frozen, poised hoof lowers back to the rock. The motion could take minutes for the slowness that she moves, as if all her joints have rusted and corroded until only the shell of what was once a horse's leg is left behind. She's slower still to put together the sound of his voice into words. Slower yet to understand the question in them. Isra has forgotten that horses speak to each other in a way so very different that the soft huffs of forest animals. She has forgotten that he speaks a language she should understand. It all seems so very strange to her. She's been alone too long in the wilderness, interacting with others of her kinds only hours at a time. Weeks have gone since she last saw another, longer still that they spoke and stood so close to her. “No.” The wilds have taken from her the ability to lie and smile, to send him on his way with a look that says, run along, I have no need of you. She can only whisper, soft enough that the syllable might be barely heard over the rushing of her blood and the unending rattle of her old slave chains. But when the word is pulled back to him on the wind she too feels as if the wind urges her to turn. Look, look, look, it seems to say. Look and see what a living thing should be. It taunts her, that chill autumn breeze, and she's almost helpless as she lifts her sea-blue, golden eyes to meet his dark, steady gaze. Isra trembles at the way the horns jut out from his flesh like spires of stone from between the waves. She wonders what things have been dashed to death upon all the sharp points and edges of him. It feels as if all the gods in all the universes have forsaken her. * * * * * i am not real enough anymore @Jericho