“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. "
She can see the violence in their gazes and the uncertainty in the way all their eyes seem unsure of where exactly to fall. All it if echoes in her, deep below the clarion call of that gaping universe churning in bottom of her lungs. Each of her words hides a fine tremble. The marrow of her bones feels weaker than gold-dust and sharper than the edges of diamond-dust.
Were is not for that story, for the lion roaring and scrapping it's claws down the backs of her teeth, she would quiver and disintegrate into shadow. If a dragon wasn't circling (not unlike a thunderbird) around and around in the thick blackness of her eyelids each time she blinks Isra would turn away and beg the warriors to show her the way of violence instead of faith.
But the words refuse to stop and the lion and the dragon roar as they battle on the mountain of her tongue. And so she looks only to the others, smiles weakly as if to say, I know, I know how foolish faith can seem, and continues onward-- ever and always onward.
“But the dragon was not just lonely and the lion thought about many more things that death. Each had a vice, a hunger for things that was not so much hunger as a black and bottomless pit that lived in each of their bellies. They were only beasts in a broken world, after all, and we all know how beasts and mortals want and want and want until the world is nothing more than fire and ice.” And the moment she says 'beasts' the thunderbird's drown out the wind with laughter and her voice sounds as thin as a dandelion seeds in a storm when their wings drum up tornadoes with each uplift and downward push.
And then one lands and her trembling rises from the marrow of her bones to every inch of her skin. It's almost impossible for her to look away from that clacking beak and continue her story. The words almost drift away from her like small school fish before a great white shark. Isra's eyes catch though on the way the thunderbird pauses, head-tilted and twitching tail, like a lion waiting for a hunger to be filled.
Isra hopes it's words that will fill the beast, words sweeter than the fury of fearful blood coursing in tidal waves though her veins.
She inhales and shoves down all that fear and worry with a violence that could make any general envious. “The dragon lived on a mountain made of gold that caught on the sunlight and the moonlight like a mirror. His mountain could have lit an entire sea for no shadow was cast from that gold peak the moment the sun or the moon crested the horizon. He forgot how to sleep because his world was always alive with light.” Her words are as fine as paper and ink. She feels almost as if she's yelling to be louder than the wind of their wings. “The lion lived in forest with a canopy thicker than a the deepest pit of quicksand. No light lived in that forest of darkness and dampness and rot. The lion forgot the name of any color but black and his eyes glowed white and blind from lack of light. And so the lion was envious of the light and the dragon wanted to drown himself in darkness.”
Isra gathers up the last dregs of her courage and reminds herself that she is a religion of wonders and dreams. She tells herself that she is a unicorn and that there is a universe inside her not unlike the storms inside the bellies of these thunderbirds. She gathers up her courage like a shroud and lifts her eyes to meet that one bird who dared to land.
They meet like the sea and a storm.
“If you kill me you'll never know how the story ends.” This she whispers like a wave whispers over the shore when the wind refuses to blow.
