“Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”
Unease creeps over her like a claw of winter scraped down her spine just once. She shivers from the uneasiness, the way her skin crawls both with a small ember of boldness and a snowflake of fear. It is one thing when she closes the distance between then, another when he talks of beasts that are less than grand like she might talk about the stars. This close the ozone smell of his feathers seems almost cloying, almost sweet, almost terrifying.
The breeze plays a song through the hollow of her horn and another through the gaps where her chain links and spirals down her leg. And when she speaks the words seem as if they too are part of that melancholy song. “I wonder though, Her sigh is a poem laced in sorrow and brine. “if you fail boldly does it feel less like failing and more like learning? Just once I would like to try it I think.” Isra chuckles then and the sound if low and sweet like a rose that dares to bloom on a dark, forest floor (feed by the moon instead of the sun).
She notices how he gives her no answer at all but a question. Only the lift of her horn and the way her gaze darkens as if to say, do not think I have not noticed you ask for this thing from me and give nothing, shows that she caught his redirection at all.
But she is a story-teller do the very core of her soul and she can no more swallow the words that boil to her lips than she can sprout wings to fly. So her gaze shifts away and her soul blossoms like a new dimension inside the cavity of her chest and she begins on a sad inhale that sounds a little like a sob. “This is not my skin, not really, not in the way it counts. I was not born a unicorn. My first breaths were taken with lungs encased in gold and a body swaddled in chains and leather.” Her eyes lower back to him and her smile waivers as she wonders if he regrets asking such a thing of her now, if he knew the river he begged to rush.
“My true body is that of a slave who knew nothing of boldness and bravery and fearlessness. I knew only dreaming and pain, blood and books. Suffering was all I had that and the idea that death perhaps might be this glorious story just waiting for me to turn just the first page. I thought dying would be the first page of my story and in a way I was right but I was also so very long.”
The air in her lungs flutters and flies through her lips like a hundred moths and her tongue feels dry with dust and salt. She swallows and the cool mountain air hurts a little on the way down. “And so I went to the sea and told the waves story after story in hopes that they would see it as payment enough for the start of my story. But when I asked the sea for death it denied me. It took my skin, my golden silken body, and gave me darkness, scales and this horn spiraling out from my brow.” She doesn't move closer but her skin ripples with fine cracks of trembling until she seems almost alive with burst of life crawling across her muscles like worms. “My chain comes only from slavery and the trickery of the sea, nothing more. Do you see now? Can you see how I cannot wear my skin as boldly as a beast might wear their teeth, claws or fangs?”
Her eyes seem to ask to over and over again as the light trickles through like mist to them. Do you see? Do you see? Do you see?
In the silence of her story that feels heavier than it did before, as heavy an a anvil dropping like a stone from the sky, Isra reopens that space between them. She only gives herself just enough space to breathe deep without the cloying ozone smell of his feathers. “I am Isra.” She says. “I have always been Isra just as I have always had my chain and those are the only two true things about me.”
“And now,” Her smile seems almost fragile when it returns to the dark dryness of her lips. “Will you share a truth with me?” Perhaps though, Isra bargains like a beast, just like the sea once traded with her.
@Blyse
