The night and the market devour her. They swallow up her unicorn bones and her scales and her brittle fragile flesh. The night eats away at her with shadow, peeling away the fresh-grass smell of the spring and the pollen coating her like gold dust. Each step through the market cuts apart her silence and her dreaming gaze that's often neither here or there but between.
This place devours her and it spits out something else after the feast of her.
Here Isra is almost lovely, almost golden with a halo of firelight brushing at all her gaunt and dark edges. That wicked spiral of bone upon her brow seems a crown. A single lily (one of the first of spring) tucked behind the delicate tower of her ear seems brighter than any diamond or precious stone.
There is nothing particularly queenly about her, nothing grand beside that firelight, horn and flower. She's dark against the rainbow of silk draped above her head like a sky hung on ribbons of comet tails. Around her others are dressed in gold and glitter and their bodies seem like holes chewed out of the darkness and filled with moonlight and starlight and light.
And, she is the smallest burst of skylight out of them all, dark as night with only those three holes chewed out and filled with light.
So even the merchants devour her, eating up her space with their bodies until she's bathed in the scent on them. Her hip smells like clove where a spice seller dropped his bucket and it the granules of his wares rose up like paint to cover her darkness with something else but black. Sage smoke clings to her neck from when she passed to closely to a fortune teller. Isra ducked her head and quickened her step there when the shed-star looked her right in the eyes and said,
He's coming. He's here. The fire-glow laid bare her uncertainty until that too was chewed up in the endless press of the market.
It takes walking around a corner for her to slow her steps, to settle her feral, wild heart from beating so furiously it took flight over the sea of her skin. Here when she lifts her eyes up towards a ray of moonlight and silver she imagines her skin smells like dust and ice instead of smoke and spice.
A cloud shifts and there, there, there....
He is.
Isra cannot help but sigh and close her eyes, afraid that she slumbered in a bed of sage as the shed-star chanted prophecy and carried her away into a dreaming sort of death. Bits of white spark in the darkness when she presses her eyelids together like snowflakes bursting over the darkness in a blizzard.
In that darkness and snow-white she quivers, afraid to open her eyes. Isra has never been afraid of dreaming, of walking in that half-there world between stars and glass and slumbering bison.
But oh! Oh! She is afraid now.
ISRA OF THE SAGE SKIN ;
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.
