' I'll taste the devil's tears and drink from his soul '
Isra comes to the mountains fresh from the sea and the snow that gathers with fury around her looks like salvation. The snow floats in patterns about her as she climbs higher, higher, higher and her lungs feels colder, colder, colder. Above the lightning flashes and the trees tremble as much as her heart does when the night roars not like a sky at all but like a lion.
Still she climbs onward, ever higher, and she blinks the snow from her eyes. It melts like tears and runs in rivulets down her face when she lingers beneath trees to give her body brief moments to feel like the world isn't falling down around it. And when she rests she looks out to the white, flashing snow and thinks for a moment that the shadows cast on the white look nothing like the shadows of trees and rock should.
But the shadows fade. She shakes her head to bury the white-hot stab of fear and the tingle of the scar across her hip.
Ahead there's a flash of dark and a soft whimper reaches her strangely through the torrent of wind and snow. It's towards that sound that she moves, slowly now as the rocks beneath her feet grow slick with frost and the snow drags at her like oil and quick-sand. Have I ever felt so cold? She thinks the words, one with each step through the snow. Isra imagines it's not a horn upon her brow but a shaft of ice, as dagger sharp as it is brittle and fearful of the spring.
Another bolt strikes and looks like a star against the snowfall and the heavens roar and rage and she cannot help but look up, up, up. Again there is that flash of a shadow where one should not be and this time when she blinks her shiver is as furious and wild as the storm.
It looks like it might be the shadow of a dragon.
And now her feet are a flurry of movement against the rock and she sees only grave-yards and dirt when she blinks away the snow from her eyes. She moves not like a queen now, but like a wild thing, a thing that remembers how to burn even when it feels like there's ice in her bones.
Isra only remembers that her hooves have any direction at all when she stumbles across the striped stallion, and that crevice in the rock beside him that looks like nothing more than another sphere of darkness in the dark of the storms. She wants to yell at him, shove him back into the cavern and hope that the stone is strong enough to hold when the entire world feels like it's dying. She wants to say so many things, but in the end the only thing she can think of as the shadow of those wings looms overheard again is,“What is it?” And she prays in the silence that he will say any other beast than 'dragon'.
But perhaps in the same flash that bares the wings to them her horn looks not like ice but steel, wicked enough to cut.
@Kauri @Random Events
