The first thing she feels is fear. It starts as a rattle in her lungs, an echo of his. Then it's a frost of ice over her bones. Higher and higher the ice creeps, bones then organs and skin. It rises, rises, rises until it explodes in bits of glittering snowflakes across her vision when the edges fade to black as the panic creeps in.
When he collapses against her, her eyesight speckles and her bones groan with the weight of him. But she stands as firmly as a unicorn before the storm-sea and bares his weight with little more than a sigh of pain and heartbreak. For a moment she thinks all his wheezing will cease and he'll suffocate surrounded by the endless air of the mountain-side. Her touch turns a different kind of tender (the tenderness of sorrows and goodbyes) when she tucks it against his cheek and welcomes more and more of his weight.
“We shall not walk then.”She coos against his skin and bends her knees to encourage him to collapse once more into the soft pine-needs and loam at their hooves.
“Stay here a little longer and I will build us a shelter. Isra brushes the words across his brow before pulling away. Her smile seems to whisper to him as well,
dream, dream, dream. Dream away the pain and I will build you a utopia of beauty.
There is is something almost sad when she pulls away from him, something full of longing that dances in the dark star-flakes of her gaze. She doesn't wander far, just a few steps and her eyes never fully leave him (how could she?).
Her telekinetic magic is almost fragile when she encourages the low pine branches to bend and the small ribbons of ivy to wind between the branches in a tight weave. The magic is shaky at best, weak from disuse from all the months she's spent living as wild things live in the mountains.
Her voice though is as strong as a moonbeam cutting through the dark when she returns to his side and tucks her nose close enough to his horn to taste the strange desert smell on it.
“Let me tell you a story.” Isra smiles at him then and blinks back the frost of her fear.
“There once was a whale, a desert, a witch and a day that never ended....” Around them the night seems almost as endless as the start of her story.
Overhead the stars flicker violently and more brightly than before over the two mortals tucked beneath the pine and ivy roof.
ISRA OF THE WITCH;
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
