'Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.'
“You could remember it too,” The words are too breathy when they come out and her heart feels like a forge in her chest, molten enough to melt down steel and bone. Isra looks away from him then and looks against to the stars. This time when she traces lines between them it reads like scripture instead of fable or history.
She wonders if the old kings looked at the night sky from between the orchids and the lilacs and read words from the night sky. It feels more like a religion to her than the sea and the gods and all their divine destruction. She wonders too, if they wore golden crowns, flowers crowns or nothing at all.
It's still strange to think she's a queen, that this place between the stars has been entrusted to her.Beneath the sky and between the flowers she still feels so very small and fragile. What is she to a world of constellations and dreamers but an interloper sent from the ocean-floor of another world?
Only once her heart feels a little more like ice and less like fire does she turn back to him. For a moment, before she spots him in the shadows faintly outlined by the city fires, Isra feels more alone than she ever has. How quickly she forgets that silence is her old friend and cobwebs were once her silken sheets. The loneliness is in her steps when she joins him and she wonders if he feels as ghostly at she sometimes does.
All her wondering tonight feels like revelations, as if the two of them are dusty and forgotten bibles of dead worlds and dead gods.
“It looks like a dream, a world of bonfires and hope.” Isra lays her head across his back, happy to swallow down the doubt his warning brings with the blaze of the contact between them. Her heart feels molten again and her skin feels like paper where her chin rests on his spine. “From here it's easy to see only the firelight and skip your gaze over the dark corners and alleyways like a stone skipping over the ocean before sinking.” Each of her words is a touch and she threads her lips through his mane as if that contact alone will keep her afloat in that sea of darkness.
She doesn't want to sink, to wallow along the ocean floor with all the bones and dead again.
“Promise me that we wont become the stones.” The whispers too feel like touches between them when she closes her eyes to the faint glow of daylight rising above the horizon. Part of her hopes that as long as they are touching the day will come and they will still be here alive, unlike ghosts and stones that live only in the dark places.
If her heart flutters in her chest, she thinks, all the better to chase away the dark with petals and wings.
And this is how Isra waits the new day, with the one stallion who saw her when others saw only darkness.
@Acton <3 fin
