Tonight Isra is far from the bonfires and the merchants. Tonight she is in the deep dark where it's cobwebs, soot and hints of brine that arch above her head like a canopy. Here she walks with ghosts and sorrows nipping at her heels like feral, rabid mutts. There is nothing but blackness ahead of her broken up by soft thin pricks of moonlight when the clouds shift and the overhang of old silk is rotten and thin enough to blow away like paper.
Part of her feels at home here in the silence with cobwebs clinging to her skin when she walks too close to a wall or a broken cart that hasn't yet been repaired. Each of her steps feels like the closing of a circle and the chime of her hooves the hard sound of a leather book closing for the final time.
Only mice, pygmy dragons and orphans walk with her here. When a dirty yearling turns a thin, broken sneer her way she turns a bit of stone to a apple and when their friends join them a pile of rubble becomes a sack of grain. The mice get bits of dust turned to corn and the dragons small gemstones to bring back to their nests. Bit by bit she fills their bellies, their wants and cobwebs tangle in her horn until she brushes them clean on that rotten canopy of cloth.
And soon the darkness doesn't feel so dark, not when she touches her cheek to the walls and turns them to mirrors to reflect the light through the alleyways. Around her this dark forgotten place of the market comes alive with song and someone both foolish and brave takes a match to a pile of rubble and laughs when it burns.
Isra watches them all and her smile feels bright enough to be a necklace of pearls held between her lips. For hours it feels like she watches them while she still clings to the last bit of darkness in the market and lets them praise the goddess for their sudden change in fate.
She did not need to become a queen to want this but somehow it feels both sweet and bitter to watch them and think that they all partly belong to her now.
How crooked her circle grew before it ate its own beginning.
@
Raum
ISRA OF THE DARK ;
“Memories demand attention, and these memories will have teeth.”
