'I'm going to live forever and learn how to fly'
For a moment Isra watches not the stallion, not the way his eyes are full of darkness and rusted glitz that's long forgot how to shine. Isra watches only the fire, only the horses bolder than the two of them resting in the shadows on stones shot through with quartz and gold and amethyst. Her soul cries for the hope, that dreaming thing that feels so dark and endless as much as it feels like a lit fire before a worn and cracked mirror.
Her skin shivers were it's against the stone and her side closet to him still burns and her eyes blink away the sight of the bonfire like it's dust and soot. She feels like the branch of a river, bits of her floating down the waters like pieces of wood and leaves, torn apart where the currents intersect in a whirlpool of a hundred small streams of force.
The dancers seem at home by the fire, dancing like pagans in the smoke that makes them look two headed. The stallion seems easy in the darkness and the winter chill with his fox tucked between his legs with more trust than she knew the world could hold. And Isra feels at home at neither place and her heart strains and quivers like a bow with no direction to go but out, out to the fire and out to the darkness and out past both these things into the greatness beyond.
Out to the sea.
But she feels something other than 'out' when she looks back at him and smiles when he corrects her. “I think if anything this might turn to cinders but never ash, never soot to blow away on the breeze.” Her voice is as smooth and sometimes sharp at the embedded stones at their bellies and along the jutting joints of their legs. There are a million small, smoldering bits of cinder in her voice, young fires that float upon a endless sea of storms.
He turns from honey to stone, molasses to amber and she wants to smile through the hard sorrow of his voice, the winter-chill of his tundra. Isra wants to break the silence with laughter and look out past his back and out to the stars and say 'What skeleton? What corpse?. She wants to touch his cheek with her lips and smile knowingly to feel flesh and not bone beneath her touch.
Isra wants and wants and wants but in the end she only echoes the stone of his voice (but it sounds like stardust from her lungs). “You are no more just bones than I and there are no shadows but the spots between the stars too thick with mystery for the light to shine. Is it so very hard to believe that you don't have to be alone?” And when she lets her voice fade into the soft whisper of their breathes and the crackle of the distant fire it falls not like silence should. It falls like a shooting start that just might carry....
A wish.
@Kauri
