She's awake before the sun, bleary eyed in the darkest part of the morning. Only the sugar-spun rays of moonlight break up the darkness of her room and it reflects in sparks of glitz on the frost and snow that gathered on her windowsill. The stars have long since started to fade and the sun has just started to crest over the horizon and everything looks almost to be edged in gold-leaf when she moves towards that open, frozen window.
It feels like a promise, this morning, and the snowfall looks like peal silks draped with a loving hand over the capital.
At first the gull is no more than another flake of snow glittering in the golden sun and her mask is just another lingering shadow of the moon (hanging on like a dream). Isra watches her and smiles for the way she can see first the outline of her wings, then the graceful blot of black and then the dark curve of her beak that looks both lovely and dangerous all at once.
That she comes with a letter isn't as surprising as it once was and she unbinds it gently. She smiles as she gestures the bird inwards and says simply,
than you.
Isra frowns as she reads and her heart trembles beneath her ribs and her eyes feel as heavy as her soul as the letters seem more wildly written as it ends. And when she starts to write her own words flow like water and like wishes over the ivory leaf of paper.
King Asterion,
Do not ask me to forgive your thoughts, your wishes or your worries. I welcome them all by ink or voice or however you ever dare to share them. Let me thank you for them now before I continue--
Thank you.
The past matters little to me. I have heard stories. But I am myself and you are yourself and I imagine we are so much more than words and rumors and heavy crowns. We are survivors of this cracking open of the very world that we walk on. We are harbingers of hope on the wings of what feels like an end of everything we might have thought was real and certain.
There is no need to beg or plead or even doubt that Denocte would ever not welcome you to shelter in our ocean-stained but sturdy walls.
Come. Come. Come.
Bring all your sick and injured and cold. Bring your entire court. You are welcome here.
Always.
I will have a hundred hearths blazing for all of you if you require it of me. The pass is open and I will wait upon the mountain-side to guide you all through the snows and the ice coated paths. I will keep you warm with stories and hope and carry all your worries so that you might rest.
I never would have denied you.
Come,
Isra
And when she binds up the letter her heavy heart feels afire as she offers it to the gull to return home.
ISRA OF THE HEART-FIRE ;
oh you seem, seem, seem
