[P] THE LAW OF ALL THINGS

[Isra]

The night does not settle easily for Isra and the last of autumn barely beats back the coming winter chill. All her fires of purpose have long turned to nothing more than ash and embers. Long gone is the sting of foxglove on her lips and the bitter tang of septic weeds is replaced by the cool sweetness of dusk. There is only the pull of dried blood on her cheeks and the tenderness of her knees to keep her company this night. Days have slipped by her as if the mountains have swallowed up the tick, tick, ticking of time that shifted around her. It feels as if she blinked and the dead were gone, the leaves turned to gray dust beneath her hooves and the Indian summer turned to the hint of first frosts. Perhaps her stories are a dangerous thing this high above the sea, as dangerous as all the broken and devilish stallions that found her deep in the forests and mountain-side cliffs. They devour time. Isra is lost in the remembering of her stories; when she spoke them and tasted blood and flowers on her tongue. She's lost to remembering a world made of spider-webs dusted with dew drops that held galaxies in their spherical edges. So lost is she that she doesn't notice the way the stallion unfolds before her gaze like a climax between leather covers and inked pages. Suddenly he is there, slumbering and bloodied and more golden that the last man that smelled like death in the mountains. Isra blinks and she feels a tendril of dark hate that these mountains (her mountains) are full of the dead and dying and she is perhaps the only thing left alive here that knows what it's like to really suffer and carry on across the rocks and towering trees. This one at least is closer to the meadows, to the flowers and weeds that offer life even when they feel like liquid lava along the nerves. “You are not dead.” She wishes, wishes, wishes her words to be true, to be more prophecy and magic than the weak bleating of her voice. Her knees, tender from the hours spent weaving her worlds over Lysander as he slept, sting when she folds herself down to lay in the space between him and the rest of the rocks around them. When she kisses a touch of her frown to his cheek her lips shiver for thinking that they must burn again so soon. “Wake up.” Oh how she wishes with the taste of blood in the air and the night settling like a tundra around them that his eyes will open and his lungs will carry on the weak rattle she can hear beneath his skin. The mountains cannot bear anymore dead. She's still weary from grave-digging and her horn is still crusted with dirt and ash from the nights before this one. And her wishes sound like prayers that she might bury no more dead things in the wild mountains. * * * * * we shiver but know nothing of the cold @El Toro