A ghost watches her and she watches the way the firelight catches on his knifes like drops of blood instead of light. Wood-smoke does not cling to him as it should and it moves around him (or is it through him?) like a breeze around a stone. He could be a shadow for all the darkness Isra watches ebb and flow around him. She knows better than most the color of the soul and how it never matches the skin.
If it did she'd be golden, brighter than the noon sun and thinner than a stalk of wheat.
And perhaps it's not his queen that watches him but the ghost of her soul. That part of her sees the blackness of his void eyes, the slither of his spine that is not horse at all but beast. Isra's soul trembles in protest to watch him come, to know the things that boil and fester in below the layer of his skin. She has bleed enough for beasts like this. She has been bleed and whipped and lashed down on altars for creatures like him.
But oh! Oh! Her unicorn skin is not cowed by the violence in his gaze. It's the unicorn part of her that is not a slave but a queen. She lifts her head and cuts her horn through a beam of moonlight like it's water. Only then is Isra all unicorn and all the fierceness of a sad legend who has just remember that it too knows of violence and hate and blood.
She could tell to him the way her blood sounds when it runs like a river over grout. She cold tell him just how much she can spare before the darkness came, just how much pain she can bare before breaking. Instead she only smiles at him, brighter than the moonlight and says,
“not anymore.” Isra watches him like a mouse a snake from beneath the curtain of her forelock, waiting for the coil and the strike.
“They can all pick their own future and only if they demand it will you make anything of them at all.”
She waits and waits and then he moves. Isra watches it and calls it the coil. Her speaks and she laughs, a trembling laugh that hints a little at both her fear and that fury of a unicorn's skin. She laughs because he strikes as all snakes do, all teeth and scale and venom.
“Careful,” Isra whispers and all the stone at her hooves turns as slick and black as the space between planets.
“I might turn your blades to daisies.” And perhaps in the most brave thing she has ever done Isra sighs and takes that final step to close the distance between them.
Being fearless, she thinks, is not as easy as her stories make it seem. Bits of fear pool in her heart like acid but she swallows and exhales and tries to not to forget that she is a queen and this night and all the rest belong to her
@
Raum
ISRA WHO SMILED AT A COBRA;
“You've taught me that bravery is being terrified and doing it anyway.”
