For a moment her eyes snag not on youthful golden flesh or wood broken up with worms and maggots but on skin as dark as her own. Isra feels a kinship there, the darkness of their flesh and the way their lungs flutter and dance and burn out a frantic song beneath their bones. Perhaps that is why she feels bold enough to press her nose to the mare's feathers for not more than a second.
Or, she only wanted to feel something soft against all the salt and splinters on the her lips.
Isra watches her usher the boy up, watches the way the moonlight catches on the hollow places on the yearling and the mare. There is something there, Isra thinks, some similarity that floats just out of her reach like a firefly in a rainstorm. Maybe it's the way the yearling catches her eye with his own gaze that looks a little like fire, daring his queen to release all that sad fury pooling under the tightness of her spine. Isra cannot help but smile at him and a shadow in her smile suggests that she would have chased the shells and the golden coral into hell too.
“Let's get you home.” She swallows down all that rage and fury and it tastes as bitter and salted as brine.
Her eyes are eager to return to Marisol, to see the tenseness of her smile and think it strange a smile could ever seem a little like a war. Isra's own lips arc in response, and she closes that distant between her flesh and Marisol's flesh once the child turns and heads back towards the citadel.
“Marisol.” She teases the sound of it between her tongue and her teeth. It tastes like rainwater and twilight. Isra sighs for the taste of it and thinks perhaps that stardust might taste a little like-- Marisol.
“I am Isra.” She coughs on the title of night queen, star queen. Isra only wants to be the story-teller and the savior of foolish children. She only wants to be the dark unicorn who met a dark pegasus, who might have seemed a little like a god when wood trembled and shattered before her
Isra wants to be a story, a legend, a thing worthy of ink and leather.
“Will you walk him home--” She pauses, imagining it as an empty space of paper between the start of one paragraph and the next.
“with me?” And oh! That part swirls in spirals from her lips like ink blotted on the very first page of some long forgotten religion.
ISRA OF THE CRAVING;
our temples and hearts,
