'and we danced like pagans while the world around us crumbled and died'
The night is as lovely as it has ever been, glittering and dark enough to take from the world every scar and stain and thing that dares to be brightly hideous. The sky is dusted with a rainbow of colors, the aurora borealis weavs like a snake back and forth across the darkness. Green and yellow and golds shine bright enough to make her think (make her wish and wish and wish) that the entire world could be as lovely as that sky above her heard.
But while the night is perfect the markets are nothing more than a pale star, flicking out the last of its life behind brighter stars than it. The stones glitter in wrong patterns beneath her hooves-- a brick where a ruby should be, an emerald where once a diamond reflected the moon-glow. Once the paths about the market looked like the stars. Once if she closed her eyes hard enough that they stung the world could look upside down when she opened them again.
Once this was a place of dreams, of wishes, of wild things that pretended to be civilized if only for one single night in century of full moons.
Now only the bonfire's blaze where laughter once did, crackling in the silence and popping where sighs once broke the silent parts of the dark. Even the whisper of tiny dragon wings seem quiet and hushed as if they too know just how heavy and still the night feels now.
Isra, as she walks between the bonfires and gives what little hope and promises she can to the merchants, feels as if she walks through a swamp of sadness with snakes of sorrow swirling about her legs. Here and there she nudges stones back into place in the pathways and holds straight a silken canopy for a merchant.
Tonight she is nothing more than another face in the crowd, easy to miss with all the darkness and strewn about stones at her hooves. She's another broken soul that looks up the beauty of the sky that hopes and hopes for something more than destruction and sadness and dreams dashed on violent waves.
The merchants add another batch of driftwood to the fires. They cheer and start to dance as it burns and smoke rises from the pyres of the past. And when they start to dance in dizzying circles of wishes, jasmine and silk she joins them.
It feels like freedom to be just another dark body in the thin masses. Tonight she's just a unicorn that dances on doe hooves and smiles at the not-quite stranger that comes close enough to the fire to look as bright as the glowing lights above her head (above them all).
@Kauri
