'broken off from a piece of clay, cast beside things greater than me'
Faint echoes of the sea still lick at hungrily at her hooves as she walks through the silent, destroyed streets of the court. Everywhere she looks there are stains left by the ocean. Silks leeched of their colors flutter like butterflies in the corners of her vision. Ahead pieces of wood drift through the low waters like toy ships set to sail by innocent children. Horses move like lost ghosts around her, eyes as glossy as the morning fog and steps as slow and aimless as seaweed caught in the rip currents.
Everywhere she turns there is a mockery of survival to meet her, sorrow to thicken her weary tongue and turn it to stone. All she can see is gray and blue and death that drown out the purples and pinks of dusk.
But when she turns a corner there is a flash of red, devil-red, blood-red. It's a red that makes her think of hope and the way blood shines on charred armor when the war is fought and the freedom starts to burn like low, weak embers. Once the red made her quiver but now it feels like comfort when she looks upon it and lets her hooves turn their path towards that spot of brightness in all the darkness around her.
Isra tries not to think that her dark bay coat is as dull and dark as her surroundings, she tries not to think that she surely doesn't shine at all. She's all dark and blood-crusted and each blink of her eyes feels gritty and raw.
“Raymond.” Her own voice is startling and it feels as if she's forgotten what it sounds like when it's not glittering and incandescent with a story. Isra's legs feel like iron when she gets closer to him, rusty and weary and brittle at the joints. She feels as if she's a rusty sword before the glory of his steel, barely sharp enough to land the killing blow when all the better warriors have fought most of the battle.
They are both covered in blood, weary from the war against the sea. Yet they are so very different and she's half afraid to reach out in greeting to him when he's so fresh from the disaster.
“Thank you.” The words don't feel like enough. They feel too weak to cross the waters between them, salted and drifting back out to the lower places of Denocte. So, she steps closer and finally offers her nose to him and even that gesture doesn't feel grand enough. “For everything.”
Isra wonders in the quiet between their words what she might be able to give the devil who bled so much for the night. And when her eyes linger on his skin she wonders then, what scars he might have as payment for all that he's given.
There is no story in her soul that feels like enough, not before Raymond the Red.
@Raymond
Note: this takes place just before the meeting thread <3
