“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
For a moment the snow feels like teeth, sharp enough to be from an ancient shark that hunts in the sky. The white flakes pile up along the dip of her spine and it feels to her that when it melts it's not in rivulets of icy water but in rivers of blood that trace out the places were her ribs are too close to the surface of her skin.
She feels torn open beneath the teeth of snow and she wonders if the star-fire that burned and blazed might shine through the holes of her like rays of moon-glow behind storm clouds. And when she looks at the snow beneath her hooves and then at the snow below the stallion as he moves closer she's surprised to see it's just white, plain and blinding.
Isra fixes her gaze on the horizon, on the place where the stars look low enough to bed down in silken drifts and snow and the moon high enough to make her think that the snow is nothing more than tears of that great rock in the sky. Her gaze lingers on that horizon and the night feels like it runs through her in streams of blood and it stings now when she thinks of how lovely death might have been.
“Once.” When she licks the frost from her lips it tastes like salt and still she stares at the horizon that grows hazy the longer she stares at it. “Once I was brave enough to go looking for death although I dreamed of it as often as young fillies dream of love and colts of quests.” Isra remembers sipping from the sea and the night and her hopes as if all those things were an old vintage, pressed from rotted grapes.
Mostly she just remembers the rot, the way she could see the dark stain that lingered like disease over everything.
Isra too closes the distance between them as he does. The snow does little to silence her chain and it rings a melancholy chime as she reaches for him with her lips and her horn shines like a dream in a ray of moonlight that breaks through the snowfall. “Do you find yourself searching?” She says when she wants to add so many other words. She wants to run them in touches along his skin, just to feel that there is something else, someone else that might just burn a little beneath the teeth of snow.
Do you seek me? Isra wants to say the words as she reaches her lips to his throat. Do you seek how to live or how to die? Oh, she could cover him in a dark blanket of all the words that boil up in the dark oblivion of her soul.
In the end, she only lets her touch fall as short as all the words that never make it past her black lips. She only looks back out to the horizon and blinks away the snow that pools like tears in the corners of her eyes.
And she wonders that she feels like less as the snow starts to feel cold again.
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