'let the light pour through all the cracks of us like stars through the black and silken night'
Once again the day is rising and the halls of the castle are littered with horses sleeping away their injuries on piles of pillows and beds of torn down tapestries when all the pillows in the castle were used up. The dawn is muted and heavy and the echoes of labored breathes sound like brittle and weak prayers to Isra as she walks between the beds and presses kisses to sweaty brows and whispers over and over again, ”Sleep. Tomorrow will come and I will tell you the end of the story.”
But the end never comes and she begs them all for another day, another night, just one more breath of their labored lungs. She begs and offers only a story to drag them through the pain and she feels weak and weary that she has nothing else to offer, nothing else to tear from her soul and give to them.
The meeting feels so very far away now and the hope that burned like a comet in her heart feels further away than that.
The dawn turns to morning as she walks between the rows of the sick. Soft light filters through and for a moment she watches the dust motes make shapes in the morning, winter chill. For a moment she blinks her gritty eyelids and wishes for slumber and fields of flowers that shed not pollen but star-light. She wishes on beams of sunlight that flit through the low, morning clouds. She wishes hard enough that it feels like her soul cracks open and bleeds and bleeds and bleeds like the bodies around her.
It's only the chime of another set a hooves that pulls her from the sunlight and back into the world of bloody silks and fever madness. Moira. Isra remembers the name. And when she pulls it up from the languid weariness of her thoughts it feels like more than a name, more than some horse made of flesh and feathers and bone.
“Moira.”She whispers as if she's whispering the wishes off of dandelions with spores of stardust and gold. “Have you slept at all?” Isra presses her lips to the mare's brow, testing for fever from Moira's own wounds, left unchecked as she gave and gave to all the others weaker than her. Admiration almost brings a smile to her lips but she's to weary to do anything more than watch the way the other mare's wing doesn't hang quite right.
It feels as if she's forgotten how to smile, how to dream her own dreams and let the story take her away, away, away. All she is now is worry and prayers that they will all give her another day, another night, another beat of their broken hearts.
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