' where souvenirs of tears are tucked away inside your soul. '
Isra is lost to the ripples of water as the other two watch each other like hawks and mice where neither is sure who is prey and who is predator. She only sees the ripples of lightning-light and the things created in that endless space between the darkness and the light.
It's the light she watches and the thunder that roars just as Isra starts her story. “There is a stag in the woods with spider-drawn webs between the tines of his antlers. Each web holds different universes that live in the droplets of blood that hang on the silken threads when a weaver has been lazy, foolish or too reckless with his art.” She pauses and smiles to herself in the darkness between bolts of lightning. And when she pauses she licks her lips and tastes blood, antiseptic and almost death.
“Between those tines though, there was one web that held not a spider but a corpse. One of the weavers gave his life for his universes, bled himself out to create life so that a lonely and sad bird could know love. For years his web was empty of new worlds, new universes, new lives. All the universes that lived on that web withered and died, without the god-spider.” Another bolt of lightning breaks up the darkness and reflects like torch-light off the tip of her horn. The following thunder seems almost like something besides thunder, something like how the shiver of a web might sound to a fly when a stag walks through the woods and his steps create a small breeze.
“It was during a winter storm-- not unlike this storm—that a butterfly came across the stag and his web-coated tines. “Could I take shelter in your tines until the storm passes? The winds have carried me far, far from my home where the sun always shines and the flowers always bloom. This forest seems dark and cold and empty.”
The stag, being a noble creature of webs and spiders and not of words only nodded and lifted his web-coated tines towards that bright, freezing butterfly. The butterfly picked the web with a corpse and dried drops of blood that held only dead universes in them.
He was a foolish butterfly, made stupid by the cold and he was quick to rest his weary wings. And when he was caught something strange happened to his wings. They became not wings but--” Outside the cave the lightning grows weak and distant and the thunder could be the rumble of a house cat's belly instead of a lion's fury.
In that silence that seems almost strange after the storm Isra rouses from her story, looks to Katniss and to Lysander and laughs. “It seems the storm has passed.” She shivers as she walks from the water in a swirl of steam and weak, almost nonexistent moonlight. To her it feels strange to lead the way back to the mountain from the darkness, to walk towards that thing that might still be circling and still feel the foolish bravery of a butterfly brush against her soul.
“Perhaps another night I'll finish the story..” And then Isra is gone, faded into the darkness like a wild unicorn instead of a queen.
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