He does not understand her fearlessness, but he remembers the plains where bison slept and how her soul called to him, and he remembers reaching out and tasting salt water, and teasing at the memories of death that played across the screen of her mind like an aurora. Dive deep... and we could find the core of everything. He does not understand her fearlessness but when he opens his mind it comes to him, seeping into his body from the earth and the fresh spring air and every touch of the night's queen body against his own-- casually, at first, as though brushing against her was a string of accidents, until the touches linger too long for coincidence.
"Together." He asks, he promises, heart growing bold when she leans into him, cheek to cheek, and half his vision is consumed by the piercing blue of her eye. A blue so powerful it could bring a nation to its knees and so deep it could swallow a man.
The thoughts of Denocte swirl around them like smoke. All the love and hate and fear and hope, hazily pulsing in tune to the melody that Isra hums into his neck. Isra, Isra, Isra, so sharply in focus that everything else seems fuzzy and far away, even time itself. Her laughter, honey and smoke, is a wonder in itself. It stirs something sharp in his belly that almost feels like pain. He leans hungrily into the sound and into her kisses, and if he were to close his eyes he would feel the water rising all around them, salty and warm as blood.
Once Eik would have said "a man without a shadow," but that isn't quite right anymore. He isn't sure when he stopped running from grief, but the whole world is colored differently now because of it. In many ways we have come to be defined by our sorrow. It no longer follows us like a ghost but it lives in our chest, and for all the pain it brings there is also great comfort-- we feel its weight and know we are made of something more than dreams and dust, something heavier, more substantial than hope. And oh, how beautiful the world can be with a generous dose of sorrow! Beauty not just in magnitude (the unknowable depths of the ocean) but in nuance (the delicate curl of Isra's eyelashes). Surely her kisses are that much more moving for all the times he's been touched in violence instead of tenderness.
(All those scars, he wears them without shame, but also without pride. Silently, they sing and they weep for her.)
When he finally speaks it is without hesitation. This is not the first time he's had this dream. "We would fly." They would fly and then they would dive deep, and the world would be without boundary.
His muzzle finds the way to her mane and he breathes in as though drinking of the night itself. He feels a little like he doesn't belong in his skin but hers. He reaches up just a little further, and into one ear he murmurs "Isra," her name a beggar's song, the only song he's ever sung. It is a song of desire and confusion and sorrow. "What is it you're doing to me?" He opens his mind a little wider then, so she can see how it feels like his heart is resting in her gently closed fist.
