A century went by and all the graves were filled only with dirt and the bones were gone, gone, gone
If Raymond is sword and sun, iron and will-power, she is made of all the things that he will never be. She is teardrops and rain clouds. She is the sea to his eternal rock, the clouds that shift round and round the sharp peaks of his mountains. Isra is all the heartbreak that is left after war and none of the victory.
Perhaps those are the reasons why she looks at his smile and sees only confidence, a devil easy with this darkness and the blood that has surely crusted that blade at his back. She sees only things to both envy and fear, for the darkness calls too quickly to those cracks in her soul. How easy would it be to sail the seas to her homeland and leave only dead demons behind when she left?
Could she ever learn to love feeling their blood coat her skin, to watch as the wickedness bled out from their veins in oceans of red, red, red?
Isra watches him turn away and it's so lost in her own thoughts that she's slow to turn his voice to words, slower still to understand him. And when she does she only gives him back his smile. It's a sad look on her face, dusted with tear-stains and ash. “I will always carry them.” For a moment she wonders how he cannot carry them and close his eyes and dream of tombs rising from the dirt like a hundred anthills. For a moment she forgets that his soul is not a hollow pit that takes stories to fill up an endless emptiness that has no end.
There are universes inside her, black and speckled with stars and comets and black holes.
“Perhaps their peace is my peace.” Isra whispers too late and he's already gone by the time she wonders if she's talking about the stories of the bones or her own death.
Around her the night still carries on and it's only the dead that are left to keep her company as the dawn begins to rise.
