He is too close, too cold and his smell is all wrong. Nothing of innocence clings to him. He smells only of dust and shadows and grave-rotten roses. There is nothing horse in the way their breaths tangle together and Isra thinks back to the forest and the ice-fire and the fear of all the innocent things.
She wonders if he feeds on fear, on that acid sugar coursing through her blood like shards of black glass. She wonders if he devours it like the orphans devoured the soft flesh of apples.
Will he devour me? She thinks and she shivers as finely as a vellum page in a breeze.
“A choice driven by starvation and loneliness is no choice at all.” Isra breathes in and forces her voice to come out as dark as night and as quietly fierce as the whisper of a unicorn's horn through a storm. She thinks of a black unicorn and her spine gathers beneath her skin until she is as tense as a wolf before a lion.
“They could belong with me instead of with a murder of crows.” And oh! She throws down the words like a gauntlet and thinks now of a red-stallion and all his fury.
When she watches him now her eyes are as dark and fathomless as the sea. They are death touched, blue as corpse-skin beneath a bay coat, a blue dark enough to be black and endless. She wants to be ice, to be a glacier that would drown and swallow up the world when the first fires of love come racing across this tundra of space between them.
Part of her, deep in another sea, calls to Eik and all the heat of the sand and nothing of the moonlight. Ghosts, she thinks, are made for night and never for golden-light. Isra knows in a way she is as much a ghost as he is death shaped into flesh (one to heal, one to avenge whatever demons it is that live inside their flesh).
So when he too throws down a gauntlet Isra lowers the tip of her horn. It arcs down past his neck, past his chest, past the hidden cage about his heart. Down, down it goes and she thinks somewhere this thing between them is words in a book-- a story about how unicorns seek out the purification of innocence because their souls are dark as night.
Isra imagines that he is water and she is ink and bone. It is the only way she can keep that point of her horn steady as a sinking stone as it lowers down.
That is when three things rise up in her.
Magic, fury and hope rise like a storm between the channels of her bones. They replace her marrow. The fluid of her joints is fury. Her blood is magic, shards of glitz and wonder that run thick and heavy like oil through her veins. Hope becomes her heart and she begs it to beat steady and true. When she exhales and blinks she begs that trinity inside of her to become, to rise like a lion and beat back the darkness of this meeting. She begs it to turn his blades to daisies the moment her horn is close enough to reflect in his blades when the moonlight shifts right over their heads.
There is not a unicorn in the history of the world who has backed down from a challenge. Nor is there a ghost that has not looked at another ghost and whispered in smoke and soot,
I know you. I know.
When she pauses there, horn lowered with her neck arched like lamb beneath the void of his lips, Isra closes her eyes. She waits like a lamb and pleads for that wolf inside her, that one who smiled at death and sunk to the bottom of the sea to breathe in a reaper, to rise, rise, rise.
@
Raum
ISRA OF THE CORPSE SKIN;
“the only way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.”
