Her heart sings a frantic song, rattling against her bones as if they are harp strings. It rips through her veins as if it is but hair and the tunnels of her body nothing more than the insides of some strange and massive flute. Isra wonders if this wild song will be the end of her, bits of her bursting out from her bones when her heart decides this fear and sorrow no longer suit it.
But when the pegasus comes her wing feels like a blanket, a sea of feathers that Isra could float away one. The queen inhales and drinks of the darkness between those feathers and the song of her heart is snuffed out, suffocated by down and kindness and empathy. She wants to press her lips to those feathers and kiss that darkness between the white.
Isra's digging turns wild with a new fervor now that she's not alone with the cries and the bleating sound of a creeping death. All she can smell is rot and feather, sea and churned up dirt and all she can think of is death and speed and fear and wings. For the first time her horn is a weapon and she shreds rotten wood like a different sort of unicorn might shred flesh.
Sweat covers her and drips down into her eyes and it mixes with her tears. All she can taste is salt on her lips (salt and wood). They dig and shred and Isra feels like a violent thing as she uses teeth, horn and hoof to destroy what is left of someone's life.
Perhaps, part of her whispers,
this is what freedom feels like. Just as she gets a rhythm down-- hoof-horn-teeth, hoof-horn-teeth-- the rest of the rotten wood crumbles down to nothing and maggots and centipedes crawl across the black like bits of bone.
And between those petals of wood, insect and torn up cloth is a yearling (whole but from the burn of his lungs). He's golden against all that blackness and at his hooves is a pile of strange treasures washed up from the sea. Isra looks at all those bits of coral and shell both hates and understands the call of such things (strong enough to carry them all from safety over and over again). Still, though she looks at him with a quiet sort of fury built up between the tears and the fear and she feels like she might explode with all of it.
She waits for the child to gather his breath, the danger passed now that the rubble is clear and seems for the moment stable enough to allow them all a moment to cool that fury, fear and wildness in their blood. It almost feels like a dream when she turns to the other mare. At first all she can see if those feathers and she remembers to swallow up the urge to press her cheek against them before she speaks.
“Thank you.” Isra whispers weakly and it feels like her heart has burst from her chest and grown wings even though the moment of madness as passed.
ISRA OF THE FURY ;
fire and fear, fire and fear
