'the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.” '
The lake is the one part of the court that Isra is not intimately familiar with and perhaps that is why she is struck with the beauty of it. Everything is gilded in silver and glitter where the stars dance like many sisters overheard. Even the shores, littered with glass-like feathers and bones and charred out holes, is as lovely as it is eerie under the moonlight. The weapons strewn about seem nothing more than relics of an older-time, a time where blood-lust and rage reigned and moonlight was nothing more than a dream.
It's hard in the lovely moonlight to glide her gaze over the warriors that have joined them, to dive deep into the heartbreak she feels to see their flesh so sinned upon. Perhaps that is why, as she steps into a ray of silver-light where a star reflects strangely off the point of her horn, Isra feels as if she sheds a skin.
In the moonlight it feels as if her unicorn skin and sea-scales flake off like rust from a sword. And she becomes something else, something new, something made of ink and paper and leather. “Faith, This new Isra says and her eyes dance like paper-thin vellum in a storm as she looks to Caligo and Katniss and all the others (all the ones she loves, all the ones she would die for).
“We must have faith.” Inside her something blooms beneath the night-lights. A yawning universes churns inside her and meteors lash against her bones and she thinks that she might explode in ink and moonbeams and stardust if she doesn't move right now.
And so move she does.
She pulls away from the others. Under her hooves the strange feathers bend and sometimes crack and she thinks perhaps that not-to-far-away eyes turn to that unicorn (who feels like something else) who walks across their battle-field and their grave-yard. Each step brings that universe inside her closer and closer to her skin, closer to the air, closer to life.
Isra remembers reading once in a book that had no title, that monsters loved stories as much a children do. For what dreaming soul takes the time to look at a beast and say, you are lovely, you are worthy? Who braves the darkest caves in the world to whisper fables to creatures who hardly know how to dream? At the time she though it a brave thing to do, foolish but brave. What, she remembers thinking, is the point in telling the story that will be your last?
Now she understands---
A cloud shifts overhead and Isra folds herself into a bed of strange feathers. And when the cloud shifts again the moonlight glints off her and her nest of feathers until she is the brightest thing by the lake. “Once there was a dragon and there was a lion in a world where the trees bleed not sap but gold,” Her voice rings out, louder than the wind. Louder and louder and louder until she's calling all those distant eyes.
“That world was as lovely as it was dangerous. The swamps were wild with sharks, and the seas were wild with birds. Everything in this world was broken, made strange by some sickness that had long ago sunk into the soil and the ocean and the sky. All of the world was tainted.” Overhead the moon still glows and Isra still shimmers and she's a lovely sort of fool.
“Everything was tainted exceptt for the dragon and the lion. They were both very lonely in their sick world, so lonely they thought they could die,” Isra pauses, looks back to the others, hoping that perhaps they understand both the story and the idea of faith.
Faith in themselves and in the mortality of monsters who might be as foolish as horses, unicorns and gods and can sometimes be.
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