[P] the dead cry out in the moon-glow;

[Isra]

Their silence goes on, broken by only the slick of their grave-digging and the whisper faint chirps of crickets and owls brave enough to wander where only the dead keep the lonely company. Isra is comfortable in that silence,  void of pretense, fear and rage. She fills the silence in her mind, singing eulogies to bones who have long lost the ability to feel the sadness that she gifts in touches and tears. There's a religion in her silent song. There's something holy in the way her knees sting and throb against the hard rocks. Her tears are a cleansing and they dry up as the moon moves in revelations across an altar glittering with flashes of dying stars. And so she goes on, rising and kneeling again, again, again in her now shared ritual. Perhaps when she finally turns back to Raymond he spoke minutes ago, hours ago or only seconds ago. She's forgotten when she made shape of his words and turned them to a language clear enough to break through the chorus of her death poetry. “Isra.” Her name sounds like a question, a if she's forgotten who she might be again. Is she something other than grave-digger? priestess of the sorrow?  the dead, sea-girl? drowning girl? forgotten slave who cries and sobs for freedom from the black stain of the soul? But she blinks and the lines of him seem to whisper something to her with the hard steel of war-strength. Remember. His eyes scream like a blade might scream through soft bone and silken skin. Remember. She listens and when she stares at him like a brave unicorn might, a warrior made not from blood but suffering and strife, her voice is a cold as any truth. “You can call me Isra.” It's fitting, that coldness from her and it falls not like ice but winter star-shine and freshly fallen diamonds of snow. Finally the last grave is finished and she turns from the monuments of dirt and ash and broken, bent trees. It feels to her as if her skin is paper-thin and covered with words, so many that they cluster and glitter in the moonlight and look like scales the color of the sea. She wonders if he can read them on her skin, pluck out her fears like a devil might, tear them from her skin like feathers from a sparrow. She wonders if she seems strange in the moon-glow, a mare who stares in hours and fills the silence only with more silence or words that seem more like beginnings and endings that conversation. Her chain rattles, sharp as the tolling warning of a lighthouse with the fog comes rolling in, thick and endless and silent. It's a song that wakes her from the dead and reminds her that she's alive, alive, alive. “Did all your rage find an end?” Isra asks-- a unicorn to a devil, the resurrected to the blood-letter. * * * * * dead flowers for all our lovers @Raymond