' like a sleep without dreams '
“It is an ending.” Isra says with all the sureness of her unicorn bones and her story-teller soul. When she looks at the weeds made brittle by the sun she sees only an end. The crushed clams and belly-up fish are also nothing more than an end. Everything around them is bones and dust where their hooves have crushed fragile shells. Only the end surrounds them and when the sea sweeps back in they will all be nothing more than the dusty pages of a book upon the deck of a sunken ship.
And she has no intentions of being forgotten. Unicorns are for legends, she tells herself, when Acton looks at her with that dark thing she's only just learning about in his eyes. He's suddenly hard too look at when sun glints off him and turns his gold coat to something that almost looks bone white. When she looks away the shadows of carrion birds flying overhead are no more comforting and everything about this dead, water-less sea seems ominous.
Only the arrival of the new mare allows her any focus at all past that sorrow and almost-fear in her soul. Isra focuses on her like a life-line. She paints constellation lines between the pricks of starlight ton her blue coat and wonder what stories each star-pattern might whisper when the moon sinks below the horizon. The sea though, is not made for stars or skies and Isra step closer to her with a warning rising her tight and worried lips. “The sea seems darker without all the water doesn't it?” Her bones tremble at her to run and the wet ground feels almost like porcelain under her hooves instead of mud. “We shouldn't stay much longer.” The words feel heavy under the stare of the star mare and Isra feels like a prophet when she meets her gaze and thinks that they look at each other not like mares but pages.
Where all the vowels of Isra fold and turn she can feel the vowels of the other mare fill up the spaces of her. The space between them feels like revelations and despite the fear running wild through her bones she reaches out her lips in welcome.
“Will you walk with us,” Isra spares a glance for Acton and she's more a queen than a story-teller when she silently tells him in no uncertain terms that the time to leave has come. He could learn about unicorns from the blue fierceness of that gaze that hides all her fear. “and tell us who you are?”
Before she turns to walk away she calls to all the others wandering out towards the horizon and the sea-that-is-not-there. Her call is a bell, a clarion call of death and warning and demand. As the horses start to trickle by them in small groups Isra beckons to Acton and the star-mare. Her horn glitters in the sun like a torch and the shadows in her spiraling bone grow longer and deeper in noon light.
Follow me, follow me. That horn seems to say betwee the slow and steady chime of her old, rusted slave-chain. And Isra's smile seems to promise something nameless and deep when she turns back and waits for them to join her.
@Kassandra @Acton
