Isra does not feel as if she walks through the streets. Her hooves do not feel as if they move and chime over cobblestone and across gemstone. The night does not feel like a silk blanket over her skin nor do the stars feel like distant constellations too far away to sing and offer warmth. The smoke in her lungs doesn't sting as it should, doesn't taste like ash when she inhales and lets it linger on her lips.
Instead of walking she is swimming. The merchants circle about them like schooling fish and the moon arches over their head like a great narwhal (silver, black and sometimes dangerous). The cobblestones at their feet could be sand for how soft they feel beneath her. The gemstones, shining gold and amethyst, could be nothing more than lost treasures and sunken dreams that pale beside Eik. Each of the wooden arches of merchant stalls tower beside them like spirals of coral decked with anemones of gold, red, purple and blue that reach out their tentacles in the soft wind that rushes over them like a current.
How lovely it is here, at the bottom of our mind-sea, in the core of us. Isra's sails slap against the current and form words that float around and around like seagulls between them.
Can you feel all the ghosts of us that swim here like sharks? Isra calls or the birds call, she's lost the definition between her and the sea and the sky in this place deep, deep, deep inside them, between them, on them.
I have never felts so different from them but I am! I am! I am! The words bubble up like brine between them and she wonders that they taste not like salt on her mind's lips but like wine.
It's his touch that brings her from the rainbow dark of them, rays of his sunshine laid out before her like prayers of golden-light. Up, Up, Up. She rises and swims and folds back her sails and anchors in the middle of that pool of sunshine.
Isra's ears still ache to hear his voice. Each of his words is a flame, an inferno, a star and she trembles and burns at the surface of their sea.
“I would fly with you forever. To the stars and then further still than that.” Each word shivers in her lungs like a butterfly brushing softly against the cage of her bones, her organs, her skin. She wonders if he can feel them, if his magic can reach down into the soul of those butterfly words and find the million other words tangled into each syllable.
Isra could make her own sea with the words she wants to say and fill it with fish made with bones of hope, scales of want and fins of need.
When he opens up the shores of his mind Isra wades in and touches her horn to the water that could be his heart. She lays a phantom kiss against it and spreads wide her own rib-cage so that he might see the pulse and throb of her heart. It beats a song of sorrow and longing and something she thinks might be like desire (part of her still thinks desire means pain and death and hate).
Isra is gentle with his heart and his mind as she wades back out to their shoreline and brushes her nose against his.
“Is there a name for this thing we are doing to each other?” There is sorrow in her voice, heartbreak that she has no name for the butterflies and the summer sea rolling inside her. All the things inside her are as terrifying as they are thrilling and she wonders that words of stories seem a weak thing compared to this. Nothing she has ever read has prepared her for this.
Will you teach it to me? Her mind-sea is filled with the question and her unicorn skin aches and throbs and burns. And her soul-- her soul feels like something else, something more.
Her soul feels like a newborn universe.
ISRA THE NEWBORN UNIVERSE ;
“because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood.”
