“It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.”
Lights wander above her head in wild colors formed of patterns that she can never hope to understand. Isra wanders with them, her thoughts as feral and free as the landscape of lights. Her hooves walk not through weeds and golden grass but through nebulous bands of sea where colors dance about her like curtains of silk.
The sky is her earth and the earth her sky. The trees seem like pillows and and they sing to her through the night-wind like sirens. Lay your head down and dream. Our roots and out bark will keep you safe. And then then the sky (which is not a sky anymore) chants to her, go on, go on. Discover all the secrets of the wild lights. Each world reaches out to her and Isra bleats like a lost lamb with both want and fear, bravery and foolishness.
And while she's lost the world is lost with her. The grass beneath her shifts to stalks of emerald and citrine that bend and sway on strange joints made of copper. Her hooves rest not on loam but mirrors that reflect the dancing light and the way it makes her scales ripple and move like fish skimming across the sea of her skin. Everything around her becomes made of the sky as much as it is made of loam and rock and water.
It's all lovely in it's indecision, perfect in the between.
Florentine speaks and the spell of the wild lights and the pillow trees is broken. Isra sinks back down to the earth and shakes her horn through the darkness as if only just now remembering that she is a unicorn and the mortal coil is her forest. The citrine grass turns gold and becomes as fragile as stalks of wheat and weed should be. The mirrors shift and change until they are nothing but stone and dirt and plainness. And her voice when she joins in the breaking of the silence seems less lovely for the normalcy around her. “Florentine. I hoped you would find me.”
Isra dips her horn in respect, a flourish as quiet as it is sad. “I would have saved anyone on the mountains. But it is good to know that he is loved.” Something in her gaze whispers that she know what it is to love something that might seem either like a dream or something that is mortal enough for death to desire. “Of course I have a story for you.” Isra wishes she knew how to wink or smile, to make it seem like the world is full of nothing more than joy and folly and dreaming.
That is when she knows exactly what story it is that bubbles up in her belly and rises to her throat like a hot spring.
“One year, not so long ago, there was a storm that lasted for an entire spring. The rains ever ended and thunder rolled through the sky like a stampede of buffalo and antelope. At night the rains sometimes cooled and fell from the sky in the form of crystals and hail and the moon glinted off them like a dream of something lovely. The trees were plagued with a rot that started in their roots and rose both slowly and painfully to the branches and then to the leaves.
The world was drowning, and all the animals who ran for high ground called it 'the coming', the flood, the end of their time. They all though the sky had forsaken them and that the earth was happy to watch them all drown in rivers and wash away to the bottom of the sea.” Isra pauses, inhales, and watches the queen, wondering if she can still taste sulfur and silt on her lips and feel water weighing down her wings like a hundred pounds of steel.
“Only the owls were content with all the rain. For the clouds blotted out the sun until the day was night and the night was night. They loved that darkness and they watched the waters for rodents and snakes that rushed right past their branches like a buffet of food.
But there was one young owl that felt sadness for the drowning of his prey and wondered when the skies had learned to hate the forest. And so instead of eating all the drowning field mice, until he burst with greed, he saved them. With his wings and talons he carried them up to the branches and showed them how to live off of the trees not yet dead from rot.
But that is not the greatest thing that the young owl did. It wasn't until the rains stopped that his story truly began--”
Isra exhales, looks at the wild-lights then at Florentine and then at the grass tickling their bellies that has turned to the long soft, down of owl feathers.
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