'A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.'
Everything changes when he wakes and looks at her with lucid, forest dark eyes that remind her of the darkest seas where only moonlight and silver dares to go. She could feel glutted on that gaze and the stories, that turn with his look, from dim things of ink and words to legends of starlight that make her quiver like a harp-string. The coming night feels heavy with that look of his and all her pores hum and burn and taste metallic when she licks at the iron of his blood that still lingers between them and on their skin.
His suffering was easier to bear, his dreaming state between the cool blackness of death and the whiteness of survival that also feels like dying. Isra can understand that stallion, the hunted one who rattles out his last breaths and seems as thin and fragile as gossamer against the mountain valley.
This Lysander is harder to smile at, harder to touch and not feel like she's a spider ducking out from the looming shadows he makes under the sky lights. It's only that faint echo of pain in his gaze that makes her smile and she locks onto that darkness like it's rainwater to the desert of her courage.
“Shh,” She says, and presses her smile against his lips to stop any more words from taking their life from the power of his lungs. “you owe me nothing besides perhaps,” Her words flutter on her lips where they sting from pulling away from him. The whisper against her tongue and she feels as if she has accidentally swallowed a butterfly. It's more two blinks of her eyes before she gathers up her courage from the dark rainwater of pain still lingering in his gaze. “--friendship.”
Her smile flickers like her courage and some part of her, buried and forgotten and stained whispers; slave, slave, broken slave.
“Linger awhile.” She says as she pulls away and rises, gathering her legs beneath her so easily that she seems more deer-like than horse-like by the way she moves. Perhaps it's the way a unicorn moves, but her bones know better than her soul and they've yet to tell Isra all the secrets buried in this strange skin of hers. “Just until the moon sets and the sun rises. Linger and I'll tell you how the story ends.” The words drift like the breeze as she walks away, warm with the last of the day's heat but cool with the dark shadows of the forest that wraps around the two of them.
Isra is gone just long enough to bring back strips of supple, white birch bark and long streams of ivy that drag in whispers through the thick forest loam. “Can you stand?” She asks as she joins in the looming shadows that look almost like monsters and angels in the moonlight that has started to crest above the horizon.
Above them the new pricks of starlight seem like a million, hungry eyes watching the story-teller and the stallion (who might be an elk) beneath the canopy.
