[P] fallen barefoot past the treeline;

[Isra]

There is a knowing look in her eyes when he blinks back the slumbering of the suffering and meets her gaze with sleepy boldness and shock. The look in her eyes seem to whisper of empathy and she shivers before his gaze as if her body is suddenly covered with a hundred hungry flies that nip and dig at her skin. Isra knows how much that paste on him stings, how his blood tingles with the healing and how it feels like fire to live. In the survival there is pain, there is suffering and Isra imagines that they all must bleed and bleed and bleed just to remember what a thing it is to be mortal. And oh! Oh, how looking at him quickens her heart as if she can feel the blood running down her skin and the fear that must have pushed him to run and run and run from the thing that dragged its teeth down his ribs. “Isra.” She offers her name like a distraction for the way her nose turns heavy against his, a warning to stay as still as stone. The sound of her name is as breathy and fragile as her bones when the way he looks at he feels like the stare of an entire park of woodland wolves. “This seems more your story than mine.” Isra almost smiles, almost looks like something more than a skittish deer who wants to run and leave him to his healing alone. Her lips half turn and her eyes almost spark like the sun on a swell of ocean water. But a buzzing breaks the silence and she frowns to watch flies gather in the places where the paste is thin enough for the blood and gore to peek though the green. The smile dies before it can form and she moves to blow away the insects with a breath that always tastes like brine on her dark lips. “Someday you will have to tell me the end of your story. But for now...” She pauses and lifts some fallen leaves to cover the paste and keep away pollutants. It hurts her soul to cover him, to heal him and remember all the other slaves that came to her for poultices for their skin and stories for their hearts. Just to look at him and remember she's not a slave here, that they are likely all dead on the other side of the sea burns and shatters her like glass. “Now you must rest and heal and I will tell you a story to keep the pain away.” Isra turns back plucks just one bloom of the foxglove from the stem at her feet. It looks both lonely and ominous in the way it's so much brighter than the blackness of her lips. She offers the small cluster of petals with that barely there smile of hers. “This will help you.” There should be a caution there, a warning that too many will send him to a slumber than knows know end. There should be something more the way her ocean eyes turn protective and she looks more like a unicorn than she has ever seemed before. The sun rises a little higher and her skin feels like flames instead of flesh. Around them the day carries on and the birds sing a chorus of live above their heads. And on her lips a story starts with “Once there was a world and in that world there was a man who looked like the largest elk there ever was.” Her eyes flash like the stars and her skin looks like a universe where it stretches over all her bones that are filled with legends instead of marrow. Tenderly she touches his eyelids and urges them to close, close, close and she listens for the foxglove to slow the beating of his heart so that blood might not rush so quickly to the whole across his side. “And on his antlers there lived another world of flowers and ivy and spiders that made webs that could hold a universe each.” She continues and the septic sting of the paste starts to smell not like suffering but like a secret forest that holds the meaning to everything that has ever been. * * * * * our skin felt like fire @Lysander