oh I'm searching, searching, searching for something I cannot recall
Up here above the sea and walls the air is cold in a way that burns and stings at her lungs like smoke. She's high enough that when she hangs her head over the edge the canopy of pines and dead branches looks only like a green blanket left forgotten by ancient lovers. Her hooves feel lighter when she lifts them to shed clumps of snow. The bits of ice look like diamonds when she shakes them loose from her mane and they tumble down the rocks before shattering.
Isra thinks perhaps that she might fly for a moment before the blanket of trees caught her. If only she were brave enough to leap, to pretend wings might sprout from her shoulders like the strange horn that suddenly sprouted from her brow beneath the waves.
But the sky has never called to her as the sea has, and the daylight full of thick clouds looks colder than a darkness scattered with lights. So she continues down the path, to the place where the trail splits and leads to the rest of Novus, her Court or to the place where the clouds look thick enough to hold weight and the heavens feel close enough to touch.
For a moment her eyes look back up, up, up with longing as her bones start to feel heavier the lower and lower she walks. She exhales and the heat of her breath makes a curtain that fades out the trail back to the top. The inhale sounds like the start of a sigh and when she casts her gaze out it stumbles across him and the inhale tumbles into something like a gasp.
Perhaps she should be ashamed to look like nothing more than a fool, a blot of brown and black and sea against the pure white snow. But Isra only moves towards him, headless of anything but the heat rising up from him and the ice falling from her like pearls. She sees only the dark red of him, the spiral of his horn that looks more like a weapon than her fragile spiral of bone.
He looks like a character in one of her stories, violet eyed and crimson (when he has only white to surround him) enough to seem as if he's made for war. Isra blinks and blinks and her body trembles with worry that he's just another creature she's imagined in the mountains.
“Are you real?” She says with her eyes closed and thinks only when she opens them to smile at his still there form that she must seem as mad as a fish who dared to walk on air.
@Jahin
