“And it's the wonders I'm after, even if I have to bleed for them.”
When the sun finally crests over the horizon Isra is overjoyed. She smiles to watch it paint the world in rose gold hues with a touch of rainbow color when she tilts her head and looks at the clouds. Today feels like a dream, a golden torch blazing against the nightmares of the sea and all the storms. And she thinks perhaps it is more splendid for the terrifying thought that the night will once again bring some struggle, some reaper knocking on their skin and saying, open up, open up, I've come for all your bones.
Isra hates that she's sometimes terrified now of what the night might bring. It brings wonder but it brings beasts of thunder too, and she welcomes only of those things. She wants only all those bright worlds of stags and spiders, seas and pearls, and forests made of emeralds.
She wants her dreams back, her love of strangeness and mystery.
And so she watches the sun rise and rise until the world is bright with gold instead of moonbeams and silver hue. It feels like a revelation, watching the day come undaunted by the horrors of the night. Isra soaks up a little of that gold and all of the warmth before she turns to start the almost endless walk home.
Each of her steps in faster and lighter than the last. Soon she's running, sprinting through the copse and the lingering gloam of the morning mist where the shadows cling the strongest to the night. Isra feels the most like a unicorn when she runs and the pine-needle forest floor feels like silk and clouds and dreams beneath her hooves. Part of her longs for this wildness, when the only things tangled in her mane are thorns and spring blooms and she's too disheveled and feral looking to be called 'queen'.
Perhaps she's too lost in clinging rabidly to her freedom to notice the stallion in her path. Perhaps, though, she's just wild enough here to see him and not care. And when she slides to a stop, a strangely bold smile on her face, Isra could not say why she stopped at all. Her chain when she stops, for the space it takes her to speak is the loudest thing on the mountain when it rings and rings in complaint of the stillness.
“Hello. Did I startle you?” She says, as breathless as a unicorn should sound on the cusp of some great revelation. The silence when it descends again seems as golden as the sun and nothing like a shadow. Isra welcomes that too, as she catches her breath and watches him with eyes as deep and endless as a dreaming sea.
@Blyse
