'I blinked and the world was gone, gone, gone
The sea calls her away again with a siren song.
The dark and taunting song of it calls to something deeper in her soul, deeper than any depth of black seawater. The song sings and sings and she feels deaf with the chorus of it. Isra shivers like a ghost walking across a grave writ with an eulogy of its long forgotten life marking the path it's walked over and over again until the memories feel unending with dread.
She feels like a ghost, a chained miasma that slips through the walls and the crowds upon hooves that feel like something more, something besides her own. To the other healers she bids caution, warning them to stay behind the walls and forget that whispers of treasures and danger ever reached out to them from the cracks in the stones of the keep.
“Do not go to the sea.” Isra begs them, pleads with them even as her chain rings in a walk and bits of rust and kelp fall like soot and rot on the stones beneath her hooves. “Be more clever than I and stray far, far from death.” She could stumble to her knees for all the begging that she puts into the words, her brow could crumble to flesh and dust from the weight of the knowing she has for the sea and that siren song.
It feels like a secret still that she's a queen now, a dream that seems gossamer and spider web thin when she blinks her eyes and notices that they all watch in glimpses that once saw only shadows and starvation on her sides.
Still, she's a queen and the sea still calls, careless of the walls that want to keep her and the mountainside that thunders and roars in the distance. The sea cares little for the thunderbirds and all the devils in the sky and upon the earth. It cares little for life and air and only wants salt and brine and lungs made heavy as stone with water.
Isra knows others will fall for that siren song, for the whispers of sand that shines like gold and crabs that look like rubies begging to be plucked form the weeds. So she follows the song and they way her chain chimes across the silence and the distant thunder and the stones sounds a little like a war-drum and a little like a noose wrapping around her like an eel (tight and cold and slick with sea).
When she reaches the sea she's afraid to see other horses lingering in the sands with their ears pointed out to the horizon like deer pointing to a cougar upon a tree-limb. They nose in the wilted sea ivy and whisper to each others of the strangeness of all that things that lived between the water. They see beauty and Isra understands well that love of beautiful things that live in the dark where mortals are forbidden to go.
There is little of the sea that Isra does not understand and little of it that she does not both fear and love. And when she looks out at a horizon void of sea water and watches for the dark waves to rise again perhaps it's that love and fear that makes her eyes shine bright with hate and happiness as she watches over the fools and hears the siren song in her every cell.
At her hooves a few crabs linger and they seem almost to be reaching up the pull at her chain as if they urge to to go deeper and deeper into the places revealed when the waters pulled back.
@Random Events
