“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.”
“A unicorn is all anyone can see.” She both laments and rejoices and her words drip sorrow as much as they float upwards in joyous mist. Something loosens in her though, to know he looks at her and sees only flesh and bone. He sees nothing of the crown and there's no expectation in his gaze when she meets it, nothing of dreamy wonder for the world around them.
Later she will tell herself that is why her magic bubbled up in her like a wellspring of ink and wonder. Later—
He ruffles his feathers and she frowns to imagine them as no more than open gashes across his shoulder, blood whispering in silken song to hear instead of feathers. And for a moment the wind stops slipping through the hollows of her horn. In that moment Isra imagines it torn off by the rage of a beast, or turned to ice and shattered into diamond dust. She shivers lamely for the horror of the thought.
“You would be you.” She answers both his question and the one she wasn't courageous enough to ask. That loosened up thing in her smiles then, bright as a string of stars against the night. And you,” A pause hangs on her smile and a burst of something, lighter than the weak joy in her, dances like sparks on the wind in her eyes. “would still be nameless.” Her smile flickers, just a little, but she doesn't ask doesn't press. She already learned that lesson.
“But,” She says while her magic starts to rise in her veins like a wave gilded in moonlight. Isra dances pass him on those doe legs of hers and that 'but' drags on and on in the silence like an hour. “If a chain is a metaphor and skin might be more skin who is to say what is real? How do you know what it is that you are?” And oh! How lovely it feels to let her mind wander like a strange river through a desert, crooked and over a bed of shells instead of rock.
That river of silver magic in her blood runs over her skin and pools in eddies about her feet. Flowers rise like ivy from the soil around her on stems of chains with petals made not a silk but scale. The soil turns to glitz and gold and it catches on the sunlight and the shadows in a chorus of color and glare. All the world around her shifts and changes and flickers from one thing to the next. Do what you will magic, do what you will. She whispers to that wave of rabid magic and sighs almost wildly as it crests over her.
In the space between the shift of stone to diamond and the root of an alder tree to steel, Isra lifts her horn into the wind so it sings again. Her smile is deeper then and it seems almost as if all her teeth are opals and magic-dust. “I was heading towards Denocte. Perhaps if you walk with me for just a little while you might decide to pick your own truth to share?” She waits and watches him with that strange look that suggests more wonders than any one world can hold.
Isra learned her lesson well but her magic has not and it dances in her now like a feral wolf around a maypole.
Yet in the end her offers falls on dead silence as the stallion leaves. She walks home alone.
@Blyse
