'In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming” '
They come to the sea.
They all come to the sea.
The gulls and the carrion birds all come to the sea-bed. Even the deer from the plains wonder down past the shore line and pick at the salted weeds and blink their eyes again and again from the strangeness of this new grazing ground. Above hawks circle and spiral in tornadoes of wings, beaks and fury and Isra smiles for the oddity of seeing a hawk dive and rise back up with a lobster between its talons. Everything is backwards now, the dark places of the sea golden where they touch the horizon and the clouds back above the court are dark enough to swallow up any glittering, speck of light.
The world is wrong, wrong, wrong. Even her stories that are dark and full of death and devils know the wrongness of everything spread out before her in a strange feeding ground of things that should not be.
The strangeness is reflected in her eyes (dead crabs on a mirror sea of blue) when she turns to Araxes and lifts her gaze to the swooping patterns of hawks and carrion birds. “Do you not think it's strange that the birds are brave enough to swoop and linger in the sea-weed while they feast on the bellies of crabs?” Her voice is nothing more than a whisper of winter wind off a sea that she can no longer see. The heat of her breath drifts up in tendrils of steam from her lips. It spirals up, up, up like a corkscrew weed that grew up through the long gone tides.
Isra smiles at Jezanna and her mind runs away with imagines of a mare standing before the tidal wave and sending it back out to the horizon with nothing more than a toss of her wild, tangled tail. “I can imagine it.” She's as lost to the dreaming, to the stories hinted in whispers of words as Jezanna is lost to the moroseness of loss.
“Oh,” There's sadness on her voice, a looming darkness that rises in pitches of chain when she walks close enough enough to offer a gentle touch of her muzzle against all the dark skin of Jezanna. “You're not powerless at all. It's just a different sort of power that you might wield now.” Isra thinks of crows and stories and how the whole world is titled and strange and waiting for the touch of a hundred different dreamers to make 'something' from the chaos of ruin.
Isra thinks of crows and then she thinks of Acton when he joins them as brash and bold as the sunlight from which he's plucked all his colors. “Perhaps,” She says and feels strange to hear the soft, gentle hope on her lips that still remember the taste of blood and brine and ash. “you have lost only one.” Surely a vendor on the sea knew the mysterious of the sea, surely he was quick to abandon all his vain trappings for his life. Surely, surely, surely. The words feel like a mantra, a prayer and a wish that she had not dreamed of a goddess and woke only to a court of corpses.
And then, before she can answer Acton there comes a ghost to the sea. Isra can see a million dark places between the pages of a story in the strange darkness in his blue eyes. His eyes are empty enough to be an abyss of space, void and hungry-- a devour-er of worlds and of universes. Like that dark beast of the mountain she imagines there is a dragon, slumbering and curled up in the strange stillness of this gray ghost.
“You,” She says because she doesn't know who he is other than a wisp of fog that moves like a shadow and her voice is stranger than the sea-bed with the soft hiss of that star-fire in her heart. “may do whatever you like. I will go bring them back to shore.” And then she pulls away from the others. Her ocean eyes beg the other mares to be better at survival than a slave who tried to down might be, but she doesn't offer a word to stop them if coming is what they truly want to do.
Isra moves though the weeds that are crusting with frost and the clams crack like glass beneath her hooves when they are too many to avoid. Lobsters and crabs and fish bury themselves in her hoof-prints, hoping that the mud and silt might offer any respite from the harsh, winter are they cannot breathe. And when she can she flips over ocean beasts stuck on their back and digs small holes to push the mussels back into dark dirt.
Where the others sea only death and fish flopping belly up she can see creatures that begged the sea to sweep away, they dreamed perhaps to swallow the air and dance upon clouds. But she's learning that dreaming is a foolish pastime and her hooves kick into a canter as the ocean-floor starts to dip down past the horizon.
@Jezanna @Araxes @Acton @Raum @Random Events
