'I only could see your eyes as the world fell down, down, down'
There is no music tonight but the crack and pop of the fire as sap in the wood boils and bursts. There is only the victory chants of the merchants, rage muted by joy and hope. The night is a tempest of sound, waves of things that are not quite melodic clashing together to fill the night with a soft kind of violence that is close enough to the sound of living to be elegant enough to move her hooves again and again in dance.
Isra feels like a star has exploded in her, a super-nova of need, of hope, of stories that need more and more than the blood in her veins to live. The world flashes around in her flares of light, gold and red, silver and black. And in the corner of her eyes that glimpse of violet and bone-white seems brighter than all the rest, bright in the dark solitude that surrounds it.
He blazes like the sliver of the moon before it's made new again, quiet and silver and nothing more than a scythe of bone between the constellations far lovelier than that half-dead moon. It feels like an dream when she lets her hooves carry her further and further away from the fire. Isra feels like a star, drawn to that dying moon just to linger in the sickle curve of it and make it part of a new constellation.
Oh! Oh how she wonders what secrets live in his solitude, what stain his soul might bear. What he carries to make her recognize his sadness as a mate to her own as easily as she blinks.
Isra leaves the fire, the song of the furious living, and almost forgets to wonder why it's so easy to leave all the glittering parts of life behind for the dark without hesitation. She beds down easily beside him, light as a feather drifting down on the winter winds. Her chain is the only thing to break the softness of her movement and it clangs and sounds like shattering glass in the muted silence of their dark corner.
There is enough space between them for the winter to creep in with tendrils of frost and snow. She shivers so far from the fires and the sweat on her skin from dancing so close to the flames turns to ice where rests on the stone. Idly she wonders if it looks like salt where it collects on her lips when she drops them to the ground and pushes a ruby into the fire-light just to watch it shine like blood.
“Their hope is beautiful.” Isra offers the words like a story and she wonders if ink pours from between her teeth when the night slips between her smile. “But sometimes I feel that it might burn as much as the fire does.” Tonight feels like a revelation when she looks at him, sorrow to a sorrow that's just starting to shed from her skin like flesh from the bone of antlers as the seasons change.
She wonders what he sees when he looks at the fire and the dancers that move not like horses but like beasts in the red-light.
@Kauri
