“Of course,” he said, but he was too caught on the sea-foam lace of her words to really take to heart what she said. It seemed unlike what he knew of her - how she was as much the unbreakable steel of her chain as the shimmer and strange magic of her scales.
But he did not feel wholly himself, either, on this strange night for survivors and for ghosts, and he turned his thoughts away from it.
He only glanced back once as she came toward him, the light on the bonfires below and the starlight above limning her horn in silver, in gold. She looked like a thing being forged, like a promise and a warning. Like a unicorn.
When she spoke, though, her words were all Isra, and he grinned as he turned back to the city.
“It always felt a little like a dream to me,” he said, and shifted beneath the warm weight of her chin. He could feel the flutter of her breath against his back and it made him feel at once wild and comfortingly familiar - like an old trick before a new crowd. “Like I could always wake up, if I had to. Like it was always safe.”
Maybe what he meant was: it felt like home. But that was a word that Acton had never quite learned to say.
Funny, then, that it came to him now, when so much had changed. When he had seen, for maybe the first time since he was a colt, that nothing could truly be safe or be sacred. Even the highest towers (the ones with the surest, quickest smiles) could fall.
But here he was, with the same stars blazing bright overhead, with the same sweet breath of jasmine around him. It was easy in that moment to feel like the storm had been weathered.
Again the unicorn broke his thoughts, and one slender ear turned back toward her as his mouth pulled tight, considering. His gaze did not leave the bonfires or the thin bright line of dawn above them, as though their burning and burning had finally lit the sky.
“We were never the stones,” he said, after only a moment’s quiet. “We are the shadows, or the waves, or the stars.” They were not for sitting still, they were not for wearing down.
Acton had no idea what the hell he was for, but he’d always known what he wasn’t. Something about her - maybe her inauspicious beginning, so like his own - made him think Isra was the same.
But she didn’t feel the same, with her skin warm against his and the almost delicate expansion of her ribs with each breath, the drift of her dark hair on his shoulder. Acton was never good at sitting still, but for once it wasn’t so difficult.
He knew then that he would remember it, this garden, this night, this surviving, and he smiled into the dawn.
oh, good lord, they've all gone belly-up
@Isra
