He calls her queen and she starts to climb out from that trembling dream of fear. Each of his breaths is a stair, diamond bright and glass slick. His telekinetic touches are walls made of emeralds, moonstones and sapphire that tower around her and feel like satin when her belly brushes against them on the upward climb. Eik is a castle of dreams and she trembles through the bright halls of him while her darkness and fear and doubt nip at her heels like wild, hounds of hell.
When she opens her eyes her lashes whisper upon each other and the smoky air like bird feathers praying against each other. They feel heavy, almost as if it's slumber he called her from. It feels as if, when she blinks, it's glittering dust of dreams that trickles down her cheeks instead of the desert-sand of nightmares.
“You were real.” The smoke drifts around her words like silk around the wind and it grows as wild as a snow storm when she lurches to close the distance between them.
She's almost feral, this Isra of the waking world who has shed the dreamy bravery of a snow coated night.
“You are real.” It comes out like a wondering, lazy start of a tale. Each word falls from her like the start of something, as if everything before now was nothing more than a draft, a sketch of words on fallen leaves instead of paper or stone.
Isra wants them to be writ on stone, deep enough that the wind of a million winters could not scratch out a single curve of their letters, their words, their story.
The last step between them is less lurching, less wild and needy. Isra forces herself to care that others are watching, to swallow down her own reckless need. Perhaps if she knew that he is more than the gray stallion of the snow she would have never lunged towards him at all. Perhaps she might have cared, or perhaps her unicorn bones would have cared little and only wanted.
But all the perhaps and maybe float away like the smoke and like her fear when they touch.
Now there is only fire, only dream-need and she opens up her mind like a rose (and like a pit of quicksand) and silently her mind promises.
Drown and I will drown with you. And her lips whisper like blown away dandelion seeds across the bold plane of his cheek.
“It is more beautiful now.” Isra lets the words blaze like a secret between them, a dreaming sea only the two of them could sail.
Her body is chorus when he asks her to walk and she wonders if her eyes are leaking out notes of music instead of tears when she pulls back and fits together the puzzle pieces of their gazes.
“Of course,” Isra says in high notes that chime like bells and harps between the twisting and twining smoke.
“Will you tell me how you see my home?”
Overhead two small dragons twine lazily together their paths of flight and the moon glints off their wings like glass.
ISRA OF THE QUICKSAND ;
“You are there in my breaths and in the spaces between my breaths.”
