“The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.”
“You are a fool then, to think the sea cannot take the entire shore out from beneath you.” The warning is bleating, more stuttering shiver of her lungs than insult when she rises her gaze to meet his. There could be ice in her bones, hoarfrost instead of skin covering all her insides when she traces with her eyes the tips of his horn to the place where the sun glitters of the spires of him. He could be a church, a golden altar covered in cloths of silk and she imagines that their horns would peel out over the ocean like bells that ring on and on and on.
For every step he takes she tells herself a story to keep her hooves still in the sucking sand beneath her. The first steps has her wondering if his rib-cage is as golden as his skin, if sunflowers brush against the curve of them where his lungs should be. His next step is the sigh of a golden blade as it's drawn from blood-stained leather.
The last step brings him close enough to touch and her heat feels as if it bleeds ink when she reaches out her nose to him and her breath curls upwards into the morning chill like plumes of dandelion wishes to float above their heads. Lazily she watches the mist of her meek heat rise and thinks that the dazzling gold of him makes a lovely backdrop for wishes and hopes and things that the sun devours up like the dawn devours dreams.
Isra thinks in wonders, in words that spark like lightning bugs behind that ever-slow blink, blink of her eyes. Is he quick enough to catch his dreams when the sun rises, to trap them in all the glitz of his form? Oh how she wonders, wonders, wonders while she waits for that fire of his touch against her lips that feel too frozen to smile.
A memory of the festival flashes, of another stallion with tines of horn rising like oaks from the top of his head. She thinks she must seem so plain to all of them with her single horn and coat the color of spring mud when all the snows melt and run down in rivers from the mountains. How cold she must feel to the fire of his sunshine skin, a frozen sea in which nothing lovely dares to live.
She's still enough to be a glacier before him, still but for the hummingbird gasping of her heart and the shallow rasp of her lungs. And when she speaks the words feel like stalagmites of ice hanging from her lips, dripping slow enough to grow longer and longer and never quite melt. “I do not think you could have caught me.” Sadness flickers in her eyes and it blazes softly like the moon blazes behind storm-clouds.
“But, would you have tried?” Still that sadness blazes and she wonders when her ice-eyes melt into his summer-eyes if he knows that she's really asking if he is some hero by the sea or a spider that weaves a web of gold to trap butterflies with broken wings.
In the end though the stallion has no words for her, so she makes her way from their sea. But she can't help how her heart feels like it's missing something when she goes.
