'and even the devil may cry when the night ends.'
“We can learn together then,” She says as his antlers rise up, up, up like an altar to the moonlight and his legs gather beneath him with all the grace of a soul that is so much older than flesh and bones. Older perhaps than the white birch tree that offered up its skin so that his soul might live to see a decade of constellations. “You and I.” It's easier to say the words between the weighty sighs of his lungs, between the blinks of his eyes as she watches the pain run over him like a tide over the shore of his bones.
It's easier to pretend the words don't give away another secret of Isra, another piece of the parts beneath this still new skin. It's easier to forget that when she watches each shiver of pain that runs down his spine she feels as if flies are nipping at hers.
Perhaps, she wonders as she grasps an end of iv in her mouth, this is the great secret to friendship-- this suffering. Surely the masters never felt each prick of the lash against her skin as an icy stab of winter through their own hearts. Mercy. She wonders where she learned to feel the emotion like a fire inside her marrow.
“For now I will only ask it to stay so very, very still.” The words are muffled with echoes of bitter bark and sweet ivy flesh. Isra sighs when she uses the gentle magic in her blood to lay the first strip of birch over his wound. She watches him out of the corner or her gaze and her heart feels like the flickering pulse of a star when she matches the thrum of it to the song beneath his skin. For a moment she forgets that they are two very different creatures and only blood and bark and ivy to tie them together at all.
When she lays that first strip of ivy across his spine and begins the start of the story's end (and their end), her fresh sigh sounds like the whisper of fog through the silver-toned gloam. “And one day the 'God' spider moved back towards that ruby that held life on his golden web. He heard the bird-song echo and his heart broke.” Isra picks up where she left off and where he awoke from that strange at the juxtaposition of pain and dreaming and living. “It broke into a hundred tiny drops of blood with edges that were sharper than rubies and sharper than the diamond threads of his web. The spider broke for that sorrow-song and the loneliness of the bird who lived only by the magic of spider-blood that only had such magic because of the great elk he lived upon.”
Over and over again she binds the birch bark across his wound with ivy and each pull is tighter and neater than the last. “He wrapped that jewel up in a cocoon of silk, bound it with every ounce of thread that he had left inside him. The mountains inside that jewel of the spider's blood turned dark and only specks of light shone through the sky of diamond web. And still that bird flew on the the darkness and he sang and sang in prayer and hoping.” Her voice sounds like song now, broken up with flutters of her breath on leaves of ivy that seem to turn up before her words like the mighty oak leaves turn belly up for the rain.
“Once the 'god' spider was done weaving his cocoon that was dark on the inside and a star on the outside he looked at all those sharp, diamond edges and smiled. He remembered what magic was in his blood, reminded by the bird's song that it was so much greater than his eight legs and eyes and any magic web he might dream of.” She ties the ivy off with a bow, fragile and curling with leaves that will soon wither and die so far from the soil where they lived.
When she looks at him instead of his binding her smile is less of a stoic thin. It's more of a meteor flashing like a crystal across the dark expanse of her face. “And as he smiled the spider used the sharp edges of his own knot of web to cut open the vein that carried all his blood from his heart to the rest of his mighty, magical body. His smile never faded as his web turned dark with blood and crusted with crystallized wishes of life.” Isra pulls away with a kiss to his cheek and she wonders if he can feel the blood stiff crusted on her lips.
The hours have passed far to quickly while she bound him with words and bark and ivy.
Already the sun is starting to turn the forest to golden tones instead of silver. “Inside the ruby where the bird lived above and upon the mountains something amazing happened while he still sang and sang and sang...” Isra laughs and the forest glitters with drops of dew as if it leans closer and closer and closer to hear the end of her story that lives in the pitches of her laughter.
“Come back to me someday, Lysander, and I will tell you the end.” A whisper and then she's gone, dancing through the golden-tinged woods as dark and teasing a sight as a giant elk that dances through the night-sky like an amber eyed doe. And as she dances through the woods like a dream she wonders if it's only the promise of his friendship that has made her so bold and something that might almost be fearlessness thrums wildly through her blood.
@Lysander
