They came before she was able to escape from the heavy walls into the crystalline winter mountains. For a moment guilt makes her steps stutter as she spots the first of them, lit by lanterns and bonfires. The emotion razes her like another disaster and she prays to any gods left to pity them that all who came survived the mountain path.
Guilt still lingers in her eyes as she quickens into a trot to greet them and it still feels strange to feel her bones move so elegantly in the night (as if she's more deer than horse, more unicorn still). On her the fires cast back strange patterns. Her scales ripple like a wave and her chain rings and keeps pace with the steady thrum, thrum, thrum of her starlit soul. She's both a creature of sea and space and it's almost easy to see the awkward way she still shivers in her skin, as if it's both too loose and too tight at all once.
“You came.” She says to the stallion in the front, knowing him only for the damp smell of him that smells almost like musk beneath the winter frost. Her gaze flicks from the dusting of dull star-shine on him to the fires and she thinks that each might contain a world of things that even her imagination might stumble over. Her hooves too stumble over the ragged pathway as she moves close enough to offer what little heat her flesh has left to give.
Behind her a few merchants from Denocte gather, breaking out from between the bonfires with blankets. They smile from beneath the scars and suffering and they forget for a moment that they too suffer and freeze.
“I'm Isra.” She offers as a beam of moonlight glints off her brow that wears no crown and she's nothing more than a unicorn beneath the stars and between the bonfires.
“We have room in the infirmary for the sick and hearths are ablaze for the cold.” Almost cautiously she offers a touch to the stallion leading them, wondering perhaps if he might be their King, if they might be the two leaders of broken courts.
As she waits for the rest of her court to join them, and offer what little they have to share, Isra says simply,
“Welcome home.” Around her the darkness seems to hum, louder almost than the crackling fires and the worlds that roll in stories between the blinks of her blue eyes.
ISRA OF THE HEARTH ;
the world is dead and still we dream
