[AW] the darkness of the dawn;

[Isra]

Isra watches him rise from the sea like the dawn rises above the horizon and the light shines through in that place between the end of the water and the start of dark, roiling storm clouds. There is something in watching him cut through those waves with his golden skin that both chills and burns her. It reminds her of darkness, of sunlight and the worlds in which the two meet over and over again in a gray fog that could devour up an entire world. There is not enough dark depth to the sea to hide the sunlight of his skin, she thinks even while she fills the hollow of his spine with ink and swallows it in the depths of her. Her own long gone sun-kissed skin once hid the sins of a regime and the secrets of a dozen different lords who called themselves God. Once she glowed with gold and sun and blood that was dark enough to make a mockery of any light that could ever be imagined or made or prayed for. Once she touched things and they felt like gemstone when she smiled against them. Once there was a time before all the golden light was bled out of her until it became as buried as the secrets that even gods cannot think to know. There was a time she was a horse and not a unicorn and she had no weapon upon her brow. But now she is of the sea, of the dark and she knows all the secrets that linger in the black waters and the blacker inks. What gray fog might they make now that she's brought him away from the sea to towards the oceans and brine and weeds that make up her soul? Perhaps it's that vein of thought running slow and slick, like oil in the chilled rivers of her body, that makes her voice sound as if it's made not of words but letters spoken in syllables instead of breaths. “You came.” It rings like the question it is. It rings not with a raised pitch of her sea-wave voice, but a wondering that forgets it was she that brought him from the hungry tides. “Did you worry the tides would take something from you?” There is no story in her voice, no beginning that rises like smoke from the soft knowing smile that is just starting to curl the dark ends of her lips. But she can feel a glowing thing in her gut as she stares at him with that look that suggests she knows everything the tides might be able to leech from his golden skin. That glowing things feels like a magic made of words and sea-monsters that once she drifted between like a corpse made of flotsam and chain. Her smile deepens, then flickers, and her teeth look like pearls in the soft dawn-light and she steps back, back, back towards the cliffs as if she's lost all her bravery without the waves lapping at the curl of her knees. * * * * * as long as we're going down @Thranduil