" I have thought some dreams should never be dreamt, but I would hate a world where that was true.”
The waters of the lake look less like mirror glass in the daylight when they are green with algae instead of silver-dark. Whippoorwills tickle at her belly and the round rock feels as flat as coins beneath her hooves. Sometimes her eyes catch on the pale pink of a conch between the gray rocks and other times she smiles to watch a crab that does not belong catch a tadpole.
Behind her there still lingers the traces of war but also the traces of something else and it all catches in the sunlight like rusted metal and stained glass. When Isra turns to look with just a fragment of fear tightening down her spine she feels as if she's looking only at the corpse of a story.
“That just will not do.” She says to herself while she begs that silver pool of magic in her bones and below to her soul rise like the sea and drip from her like rain.
Someday she will tell the court it came to her in a dream. One night she'll tell a gray stallion that it really came to her when she flew and sailed on and over a sea that lived in a universes where there were only two creatures alive to walk the shores. Someday, she thinks, she will share this thing with Eik.
If she can figure how to bring it to the real from the deep dark of her dreams.
And so Isra wades into the water and her skin shivers for the needles of cold that sink past her skin and into her bones. It will help keep me awake, she thinks.
Beneath the waterline where her hooves sink into the soft waterbed the soil melts like molten metal and turns to textured gold cut through with dapples of wood. The metal and the wood stretch out behind her, back to the shore like a path to a dream space that lives only beneath the surface of the still water. There it fans out and diamonds rise up from the soil like plants to line the edges of the pathway.
Then Isra begs the water to change, to turn to mirrors instead of liquid and curl around her like a rib-cage. She begs until sweat pools above her eyes and along her spine. But try as she might the water refuses to listen and only the soil seems eager to dream of another existence.
@Asterion
