“The only freedom you truly have is in your mind, so use it.”
She does not hear him step upon her golden and wood-streak pathway. Her magic does not whisper warning to her and the soft slap of the water on the shoreline hides any traces of horse-sound. All she can her is the heavy sigh of the air in her lungs and a cicada humming in a tone so close to the way her magic hums and sings and vibrates like wings beneath her skin.
All she can hear is the wonder of dream stretching out its smoke and stardust chisel and molding the world like soft, molten gold.
But oh! She notices the water when it parts like the binding of a book. It rises up around her like small walls made of weed and scale stones. When she turns to wonder at it, thinking this seems a strange thing for her magic to do (shift instead of change), the water glints beams of silver-light when the sun catches on the new sharp edges of the water. And then it's not glinting off the water at all, but off-- him.
“Asterion.” She sighs in relief to discover her magic has not betrayed her and turned into something else inside her own skin. Part of her always feared that her magic would end up belonging to the sea and the surf and never to her at all.
A crayfish scurries back to the water before them and Isra laughs at the way all its movements seem angry. “I wanted to build a tunnel made of glass so that the world might see all the things that live in the dark and dream, perhaps, of air and sunlight.” Isra closes the distance between them. Her hooves ring like song on the gold and the wood. The touch she glances across his shoulder is a song too, a plucked harp string that rings even in a fading echo. “But the water does not love me as it loves you.”
In the empty space between the water and the pathway Isra begs more muck to change. It turns to more wood and gold. Steel edges this part, dark as ore and threaded through with glass and glitter. But the water, even parted will still not change.
So Isra returns to the shore and begs the weeds to collapse and turn to panels of something stronger and more flexible than glass. It spreads out like a hay-field before her, squares of glass instead of crop. The sun seems fire-hot when it reflects off that strange field, and when she looks back at Asterion she has to blink back her weariness. “Will you help me? It's harder than I thought to make real a dream.”
Around them the world looks like fire and bright, metallic light. Isra thinks there is not a moon in the world that could make Asterion look as perfect as he does now.
@Asterion
