[SWP] it's fingers of foam, circling around

[Isra]

The sea calls to her from far beyond the stone walls and the crush of bodies that ebb and sway like eddies when she walks among them. It's a bell-toll of vibration and it shivers up her legs and plucks that horn upon her head like a harpsichord string. On and on the sea calls her, awakens all that slumbering salt in her veins and thickens her blood until her heart beats in hours and years instead of moments. Everything is diamond sharp as the sea calls to her and she feels as if she moves in slow motion through the market streets and then through the keep pathways. The day passes by as a year does and the wings of birds carrying letters look like ten different nights setting across her body when they fly overhead. When the night finally does set and she listens to the streets sing the of the wonders laid bared by the waves and she looks up at the sky and sees not stars but a mausoleum of tombs made of bright light. And still the sea calls and crawls it's message with icy, inky fear up, up, up her legs and into her fragile heart that beats like a hummingbird when the messages turns to words that shatter like falling stars when she looks away from the night sky. The sea calls and it says, death and drowning, death and drowning. It calls like a crow, a reaper far above the mortal realm and it feels like a mark against her broken soul that she knows the song of the ending so very well. It sings a chorus in her bones and she lets that instinct that carried her swifter than the wind down the burning mountainside take over. “Away, away, away.” Isra chants her eulogy through the night in the streets and they must think she's gone mad again, crashing against the slick, sweating sides of others as she urges them all to run, to flee, to do anything but think they are safe behind walls and wealth and silly things. “Get as far away from the sea as you can, climb as high as your legs will carry you.” Isra nudges a child from the streets and nips at his hindquarters when he pauses to look at the wild, mad unicorn with a fear that froths like white-water in her eyes. But she's not fast enough and the sea calls her in a fervor through the stones below her hooves.. She's not fast enough and her salted blood feels as cold as the moon as the world feels like it takes one big gulp of air in the dawn-light. Silence grows and it spreads around her like a disease and then bird-scream breaks the stillness and the world erupts into chaos... The waters crash against the stones walls and Isra calls herself a fool for thinking stone could keep the sea from her, protect her from those violent waves that still call, death and drowning, death and drowning. Her legs are wild as they clatter against the now slick stones and the water drags her knees towards the ground. It's not long before she's under, sweep away by the rapids rushing through the streets and her horn bobs above the waterline like a scepter of a dead thing. But Isra knows how to swim better than most and she screams in bubbles and determined lungs as this sea that tries to reclaim the  story-teller who took from the waves a second chance. But soon there are stairs before her and her eyes sting from relief and salt as she climbs even as she screams through the black salt-water. Death and drowning, death and drowning. The sea still calls as she rises from it dripping blood and water and dirt. Every sting is a war and she looks up long enough to see other rise like sirens around her and she smiles a weak, soldier's smile to them. And though the sea calls and calls and calls, Isra looks out at the injured before her and summons up ink and ichor to fill the fear that still rattles deep in her marrow. “Come away.” She turns, passing a gaze over the distant red and gold and white that she's seen before. They stand like sentries in the courtyard, gargoyles made of flesh and bone that seem as immobile as stone with the waters lapping like snakes at their fetlocks. Isra is no gargoyle, no great unicorn to listen to the coming beasts and the calls for death that they make through the sky with their wings. She is a storyteller who knows how to heal and how to soothe all the places deeper than blood that break and shatter and lead the healthy towards death and drowning, death and drowning. “Come away.” She coos to the newly risen horses, welcoming them to dry stone beyond the seeds of lightning sparking through the dry skies. “Come away and I will tell you all a story while the world dries around us.” And though she smiles and touches her nose to their bloodied shoulders and dirty faces she looks out at those sentries and feels a pinging in her soul that this is no chaos to be so easily weathered. But for now she knows how to undo the damage the sea does to mortal bodies and she turns away to heal the bloody and soothe the fearful. * * * * * i wish we had more time