'I want to be a God of a girl'
He turns from the flames and Isra watches him, watches the way his colors fold in the night like dreams into dream-catchers. For moment she's jealous of how easily his edges turn to shadows and she wonders if the light of the fire still leaves a blazing sun in the center of his gaze. Part of her wants to dissolve into the darkness with him, to live as a star (telling stories in pulses with the blanket of night pulls over the world).
But then the merchants toss more driftwood onto the bonfire and she's caught like a star in a cloud, watching that soot and fire and smoke rise up to swallow up the moon. A pygmy dragon dips in the sky and his wings bring from the smoke grand patterns that to Isra look like a million, glittering snakes that circle the world. The dragon swoops and dances and soon a few others join him and they dance and twine their necks together in arrangements of wonder.
Isra's eyes feel dry from watching them. She never blinks as she remembers that she doesn't want to dissolve into the night, she wants to burn and smolder and devour all the heartbreak in the world. Her skin starts to itch where it touches the ground and the rubies glitter like treasure in the corner of her gaze when she turns it back to the shadows and him.
She blinks for his words, for the spell of his sorrow and his sadness and they way his tongue moves over the sound of 'rot'. Isra is captured in the web of his sorrow, eager to feel the pinch and sting of his melancholy like teeth on a veins. “Be brave.” She whispers as she might to an old book and she's tender enough in her command to not crack him like an old leather binding.
And the silence between them feels a little like the empty space between chapters, thick with potential and ink stains.
“Isra.” She corrects, blinking away the stab of the sound so formal a title makes in her black, stained slave-soul. “I will die to keep all my promises if the fates require it of me.” Like a true unicorn of legend she makes her bond and it shivers down her body in shards of ice and moonlit-magic.
“I still worry though that Caligo was wrong to choose me that night.” The last she offers like a gift, the blackness of her uncertainty for the darkness of his own.
And in the silence between her last word and the next inhale of her lungs a child comes before them. He asks Isra to dance, egged on by the taunts of his friends. She smiles turning back to stallion with something close to amusement in her ocean-eyes before leaving him to head back towards the fires and smoke and joy.
@Kauri
