“It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.”
“Oh,” She says and her joy slips away on a sigh like the sea slips away from the shore. Isra shivers with the coldness of it's loss and her gaze slides away to the bows of branches curling above their heads. Each leaf, when it dances belly up on the breeze, seems to be a ghost. They all chime their soft edges against each other and against the branches and they taunt out her memories.
“If only--” Her words are almost strange sounds, each an inhale and exhale of her lungs and she almost tumbles over the syllables like they are stones and she a weak summer creek. Around her leg that chain sings and chimes a sad song as she drags her hooves through the loam and the pine-needles. The bits of kelp sound like harp strings made of satin when they coo against the steel and sigh against the dark skin of her legs. “I fear my chains have a much sadder tale to tell than that of a beast. But sometimes--” Each of her words is softer than the chain-song, softer than the birdsong chorus deep in the canopy. “sometimes I wish to be a beast, to be fearless and bold.”
Her sorrow is the only loud thing about her.
Isra inhales and shakes off as much of the sorrow as she can. Her smile though, seems a sadder thing in the wake of it, as if all of her is suddenly just a little bit less. And when she closes the distance between them there is no part of her that looks dangerous (but for the point of her spindle horn). She looks only like a unicorn of old, a throw back to time when magic lived in their bones and their horns healed and never tasted of blood. If it were not for the darkness of her skin she could be an old ghost, a specter of a dead thing.
But the sunlight shifts and it does strange things to the shine of scales at her belly. They look to be bits of stars made not with fire but saltwater and sea-foam. Isra wonders then, as she watches the sun do strange things to him too, if he can see how she doesn't sit in her skin quite the right way, how bits of her seem darker than her shadow that stretches out like a lazy hound below her.
She says nothing more about danger as the sun glints over the scar across her hip. Her body shivers to feel any heat (even distant warmth) against that mark on her.
“Where were you headed?” Only then does her delicate shiver turn to something that almost burns through her like excitement. Her breath pauses in her lungs as a story-teller's breaths often do. Sometimes Isra thinks that every direction here in the mountains leads to a story, an adventure, the first step of a grand legend.
And Oh! Oh! Oh, how she wants all his stories. Perhaps that is the danger of Isra. She eats the adventures of others greater than she and recreates it into something eternal. Maybe she is a beast after all one who eats and eats and eats of words instead of muscle.
@Blyse
