His smile is nothing more than another black, wicked blade against the void of his skin. His words are nothing more than the hiss of hellish smoke, the drag of a reaper's scythe over stone and over silk. Isra wants to cower from the way they dig into her flesh like barbs and weed roots. Instead she inhales and begs that wolf and that unicorn in her skin to rise like a tide, rise like a red-moon.
“You and I have very different ideas of salvation.”
Then his blades turn to flowers and she thinks not of salvation but of fury and magic and wolf-skin.
The daisies are all wrong, Isra thinks as she watches them turn black with rot and wilt under the weight of mildew instead of morning-dew.
wrong, wrong, wrong. The daisies fester against his skin as if all the blackness and ire and rage denies the life from anything that might be even a little lovely. Oh, how she prays the sickness is in his flesh instead of in that thin, sapphire sea of magic inside her bones.
Raum snaps like a lion sent forth with starvation a hollow fire in his belly and Isra is the only antelope left in the entire world. She has little time to react, her flesh knows violence but not defense. Her thoughts run wild like ink wolves through a forest of paper-fires. Each of her thoughts rings like a baying song, a chorus of howls and heartbreak and for a moment she lets the sounds flash in white-glare when she presses her eyes tightly together and prays.
It's her magic that answers. It rises up like a thunder sea against the sharp cliffs of his fangs and runs like ink from her bones, to her veins, to her skin and then to all world around them. There is more fury in her magic than there is fear in her heart and she lets it carry her away like flotsam.
Isra opens her eyes then and they are hot with magic and with a bright, consuming sort of rage. She rages like a lamb, all innocence and dull teeth but enough passion to devour cities. The stone and glass beneath their hooves ripples like dragon-skin. First it's black, then green, then red, red, red.
Soon it's not scales at all, but blades that look so very like Raum's wilted and rotten dead-blades that ripple and rise like flowers. They rise below his white belly as if he's made of light instead of horrors. Each leaf is a jagged blade. The ribbons of fabric turns to ivy. But the ivy climbing the walls of the alley isn't plant-life but spindles of rusted, barbed wire that screams as it sparks against the stone.
Horror spreads out from her like a storm of small nightmares that came to her each time she slept in a skin that was golden and coated in bloody chains. This new world around them is a fitting place for ghosts.
“Should I tell them then,” Isra bleats as much as she growls the words and each curl of sound through her throat stings when his teeth dig in a little further.
“that I can wield more than just flowers?” And in that silence between her words and his teeth the bladed flowers still rise and sway in a night wind and the barbed wire ivy climbs the walls where once only tattered silk and cobwebs thrived.
@
Raum
ISRA OF THE BLADED FLOWERS;
“For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death.”
