the snow fell like death, silent and full of a sorrow too painful to be made into prayer
The night when it settles is a cold thing. It's black and frozen with crystals of starlight that make the softly falling flakes of snow shine. The snow glitters around her, glowing in the moonlight and she imagines it's stardust and wishes brushing against her smile when she tilts it up, up, up towards the frozen night sky. Around her the world is muted in snow, hushed and sleepy and the soft, distant breathing of the bison herd sounds like nothing more than a frail echo of her own lungs.
Isra feels as if she is the only thing left in the world, a single thing made of heart and heat, that melts the snow when it drifts lazily down and lands upon her back. And when she walks the tall grasses sound like tiny shards of glass beneath her hooves where she walks across the places they bend beneath a layer of ice left over from the long gone dawn.
What do the stars see when they look down? Isra wonders in breaths of smoke that rise up from her smile that is still angled up, up, up towards the falling snow that glitters in the silver night lights. Do I look like a dark furrow of snow against the white, a shadow of the snow that might be ash flaking off from their light? Her smiles feels like fire on her skin as she watches the heat of her rise up like her gaze and dissipate into the winter.
Oh! how small she feels in the snowfall, dark as the ground where the snow grows thick enough to swallow the blackness into a white that almost looks blindingly bright under the moon. Even her hoof-steps as she walks though the thickening snow feel like no more than the movent of a ghost. Isra feels like a unicorn made not of the sea but of the snow and the stillness and all the things that melt away and evaporate when the sun creeps closer to the earth.
She hums to the sound of her hooves on the snow and ice, a soft gentle song of dreaming, of words too fantastic to be made into the mere language of mortals. Tonight in the snow her song feels heavier for the stillness around it, a shadow of sound in the strange white glow.
And it's not until she stops near enough to the slumbering bison herd (all tucked together into one great expanse of darkness in the snow) that she realizes it's no song of fable that lives on the edge of her lips and the hollow of her jaw.
It's a lullaby of sadness and sorrow. It's the song of a unicorn who feels as if she's the only thing that's alone in the slow, lazy snowfalls.
