Their people tangle together-- dusk to night, stardust to pastel hued moonbeams-- and Isra when she brushes the trail of her tail at his hooves entwines the two of them as well. And then they are just black and bay, twilight and ocean-blue. Their shadows too bend and mold against each other until there is only a massive hole of blackness at their hooves, blackness, cobblestones with flickering firelight edges and nothing else.
Together they walk, Isra almost brushing her belly against his and there is still only shadows and starlight between them. The bonfires are almost behind them when she starts,
“When I first came here this path seemed different. It has always been beautiful with the bits of marble between the stones that glitter with mica. But when I walked it first it seemed to me like a slumbering dragon, scales of glitter and night and slumber that hid violence with loveliness. Each step I took fear followed me and my shadows were not mine but the shadow of a reaper's scythe that dogged all my hoof prints like a predator. For months I lived in cobwebs and fear, hunger and want.” Each of Isra's steps seem now not like a step upon stone but a ringing bell, a soft melody broken up by a story-teller's song. Words flow like spring creeks from her lips, her teeth the rocks that break up the down-hill current of all the things that live inside her.
Ahead the castle waits, doors of cedar wood and iron rimmed in crystals (one of every color for the dreams of her court) rest open on their hinges. It's an ode to the dragons of the past, massive and mighty and perhaps were they not open terrifying. And when Isra pauses in the doorway and looks back at him the seem like an archway into another universe, a place where anything is possible, any dream and any nightmare.
There is no fear in her now. Now she is only a unicorn and her chain is only a strange metal between which harp-strings might be strung. She is a queen who wears a horn instead of a crown and moonbeams and stardust instead of silks.
“Fear is a thing I could almost forget and my shadows are promises instead of graves. My worries are made of comet-dust instead of ash and embers.” Isra swallows up the between story, eats the frost-fire with forgiveness and the salt-waves with that new fire in her bones. Perhaps Asterion will piece together the then and now, perhaps he will remember a girl of glitter and scales who told a story by a tree in a meadow of flowers while he walked around and looked only up, up, up.
Either way Isra doesn't give him a chance to ask and she turns and walks under that doorway of crystal, iron and wood. Ahead a room of quartz and blue-stained marble walls waits for them. Chandeliers hang from gold-leaf edged ceiling and their small fires cast strange kaleidoscope shadows over them as they reflect off the crystal and glass.
It's easy to forget the stains of water that linger at the bottom of everything, the brine that breaks up the cedar-smoke and spice smell of the castle. Easier still to glaze over the way the scales of her belly dissolve into the dark shadows of the night that pool in through the arched windows. And when she smiles it's easy to forget that they are from two different thrones and two parts of the same world.
“Are you cold?” Isra asks and it sounds like a challenge of that dreaming sea and they could either float away or sink below the surface and see what the dark holds.
ISRA WHO WALKED UPON A DRAGON ;
“Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?”
