His silence is a heavy thing between them when he finely breaks up the winding weave of her story. It hangs on her thoughts like ore and drags down her skin like a dull sword that belongs to a dead knight. This sort of silence is a familiar thing, a hollow beast that eats and consumes the world until it explodes like a supernova into something as impossibly lovely as it might be complicated.
“Perhaps you should have been afraid.” She starts while watching not his eyes but the way the chandelier light loves the dusk and starlight skin of his. Even his shadows seem like fantastical things in the swinging light, darkness that feels not 'dark' at all. But she has no other name for the way his skin looks so she continues. Her understanding feels as whisper-thin as dragonfly wings on her lips when she looks back to his gaze and lets her own burn and burn and burn into that deep and dark sea beneath his bones.
“It's only the after the fear that everything seems real. Sometimes I think fear is a thin layer of dust over forgotten treasures and we must all brave any ancient curses to wash it clean. Fear lets us know that we're alive enough to feel.”
There are a million stories of fear and bravery and knights that she could tell him. Isra could fill centuries with stories of fear but somehow with the smell of brine hanging like a ghost around her only one feels right.
“I forgot once how to feel, before I was a unicorn.” Her voice ends like a eulogy, suddenly devoured up by the heavy silence that feels like a ore and a sword.
When she looks up towards that golden ceiling the rest of the story eludes her, skipping away from her like a grasshopper before that carrion snake of silence. Isra is happy to see it go and happier to feel a bright burst of joy when no more words come.
“I can show you a secret.” All of her seems more unicorn than queen and each of her words drips with life as if she's been consumed with the poison of living. When she turns all the light seems almost to shift and flow to her before she enters a long and winding hallway.
Like a siren she leads him on with nothing more than the melodic song of her hooves and her chain and the soft coo of her tail across the stones and the carpets. On and on the hallway and her song seem to go, circling around each other. One moment they are walking on the boughs of her song and the next only on dark-seas and musty forgotten fabric.
On it goes until suddenly they are not walking anymore and the hallway has opened up like a cave-mouth before them.
The air here smells not like brine but steam scented with cedar and balsam and dead, paradise flowers. Stone gives way to water that could be still but for the shifting firelight of low-hung baskets full of wood and coal that sway in some source-less breeze.
Of course this is the secret. The whole world feels dusted in heaviness here. Even Isra doesn't know who lights the fires overhead or who burns oils and branches to make this whole room feel like a dream.
“Are you still cold?” She laughs, amazed at the way the mist moves before her as if her words are dragon wings cutting through clouds.
And with a look that is another challenge she walks into the water, smiling as secretly as the fires blaze when both the mist and the water swallow up her body.
ISRA OF THE ROSE WATER ;
“and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong.”
