'light up the night sky like a fire'
They walk together and the Court unfolds before them like a hundred bits of silk might unfold before a design. Banners snap in the cool wind and Isra thinks of how loud butterfly wings might sound to flowers. Families walk across the stones and their hooves sound like song, keys made of ivory and bells made of laughter. Sadness and joy thrives around them in a strange but beautiful tangle that feels for a moment exactly how Isra has always imagined life should feel.
She's just learning, like a child might, how life might feel. Isra is just understanding how to bend her knees and walk when her soul stumbles and sobs. It still feels strange to look at death, to taste it in the darkness on her tears when they run deep enough to drown and want only to breathe.
She wants to live even though it feels strange to have such a simple thing feel like a want instead of a need.
Isra breathes as a burst of silence breaks up all the sound like a bomb. And in that silence she can only taste a hint of flowers and the musk of adventure and rain. Part of her wants to ask what stories he smells of, what flowers make up the crown upon his brow for she has no other name for them but beautiful. (But ask her what different tips of leather and steel feel like inside skin and she will tell you a story of each.) Instead she only echoes his smile and it seems weaker for the paleness of it compared to all his, all his-- brightness.
And when she breaks up the silence before their surroundings might she pushes her shoulder closer to his with each word and ring of their hooves. “What brings you here?” Her question echoes weaker than the silence like a bit of salt left to blend in with the snow. To her it feels softer than the echo of his hooves on the pathways dusted with gems and cracked stones.
The part of her that wants to live craves for a moment to be louder than both the silence and the night and the everything that might ever be. But she's still the queen that blends too easily with the shadows to shine and seems too dark beneath the sun to be lovely.
The sun looks like fire above their heads, brighter for the whiteness of the winter and the darkness of the destruction. Her eyes sting when she looks up and she welcomes the burn to stop the words burning at her lips from coming.
Have you come for me?
@Ipomoea
