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

[Isra]

Her legs feel weak when she moves towards him. Isra waivers as she walks and she sways like a newborn dear as the blood rushes through her veins and her nerves feel like knives against her nerves feel like a million tiny, stabbing needles. This night, with the dead, makes her feel new. She could be an empty book, bound in seaweeds and sands that have turned to glass. She could be anything. Denocte, when she looks out to the blackness that looks like the sea around this small patch of moonlight and graves, looks like a darkness that could be anything when the sun rises up and devours the night. Perhaps the darkness is not black but blood, dark but full of the power to create, to shape, to take back the nothingness. Perhaps the night is not the night and when looks at Raymond it feels like looking at the sun, a flare of fire that arcs out and out until it brushes the winter sea of her dark brown skin. But now her blood rushes normally though her legs and she moves once more like a unicorn. Her hooves seem loathe to touch the remnants of the ground and her chain tolls like a choir instead of a reaper's song. The night heals around him and she answers the regret in his gaze with sorrow and understanding. Who is she but regret? Isra is sadness trapped in a skin that belongs to the imagination of the sea more than it belongs to the soul it holds. “It always would have been to late.” It was too late for all of them the moment the pass was destroyed and the gates clanged shut with a force harsh enough to knock down the moon from the sky. It has always been too late for Isra. She was born  and it was already too late, too late to be anything more than broken. Her soul rattles a death rattle in her chest when the thought catches and snag on her soul like a shard of glass against silk. I was born to break and I never could have been anything else. It's a revelation in her heart and it breaks her back down to nothing but regret for things she would never be mighty enough to change. Isra knows, even as she offers Raymond the cleansing touch of her nose against all that blood color of his shoulder, that she will never be mighty enough to heal that great chasm in her soul. But still she will go on, this she promises and it's easy to think it with a fire beside her. “And you,” Her touch lingers, moving along his boldness like a farewell of the tides before they are pulled away by the orbit of the moon. “who will you be now?” The silence falls again and it feels like the fire of him has sucked out all the oxygen from the air between them. And in that silence Isra looks back at their freshly dug graveyard and thinks that the bones below the piles of dirt will always just be dead.   * * * * * a devil could dress as a mockingbird and dream @Raymond