'I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. '
Had she paused long enough to answer Jezanna perhaps she would have said, You are female we need no other power but that. And perhaps she would have started to believe it a little more. They are wild and they are free and there is no sea or death that could take from them those things. Even in the darkness there are no more chains that she could stand to wear. But the water-less sea calls to her and the fools beyond the ocean weeds and she only gives the mare a sad smile that says perhaps she knows too well how helpless feels (and she knows she refuses to feel it again).
So she continues on acting like the queen she should feel like when she demands that her people return to shore. Her horn quiets their protest and she wonders perhaps how they can see any violence in that spiral of bone. Isra doesn't know to be angry at them, how to rage that they taunt fate. But she's learning many things in this new skin of her and soon she understands their caution when her eyes flash like storm seas.
The first bloom of rage unfurls in her chest like a new rose on a tower of thorns. It's red, blood red.
It opens in her soul when she spots the horse bones, picked bare like a treasure chest bleached to pristine white by the sun that never should have reached them. Her rage rushes once it's been unfolded and it flows in a secret waterfall through her veins, bits of ice and fire and steam that pour from her eyes like sorrow but burn like fury. The rhythm of her hooves falters as she pauses at the bones and her lungs feel too large to be held inside mere bone and flesh.
And when the pressure boils up it sounds like a scream when she parts her salted lips to sob. She sounds like a unicorn and her horn looks like a weapon when she tossed it to the sky in that rage even gods could not mistake. The rage is still there when she watches Acton stumble past the bones and spook and she thinks that he must understand that these bones look nothing like she once dreamed her bones becoming.
That she misunderstands his faltering is a blessing for perhaps she would have finally thought of her horn and chain as weapons and nothing else.
The interaction between Acton and the pinto is tinted by her rage and she fumes silently at the greed of the stallion. Only her uncertainty if the urge to chase him back to shore with the tip of her horn belongs to her or if it belongs to her bones and flesh, stills her voice and hooves. Instead she only watches, silent and glaring (even though the expression feels strange on her brow) as the two part ways and the pinto retreats back to the shore.
Her horn tingles and she wants, for a moment, to follow him.
Isra saw the way Acton looked down towards the coins at her feet. She noticed them at well but she sees only death, treasures given away to the sea only by the calling of the reaper. The sea takes nothing easily, nothing gently (besides her, her memories remind her but she shakes them away with a toss of her mane). “Death is no miracle, Acton.” Isra watches him not like a mare but like a unicorn and if a little of all her rage leaks out in the words she's cannot bring herself to care, not here, not surrounded by so much death.
@Jezanna @Araxes @Acton @Raum
