“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
It feels like a month that she ponders the rows of glass before her. All her moments catch on the slick surface for each pulls from her a hum of her heart and a sigh of her lugs. Isra blinks back the weariness even as her skin trembles finely. Sweat darkens her eyes until they are more bits of gemstone in ore than eyes inside a skull. Even her lungs sing of slower song and her heart a waltz inside of a reel.
At first Asterion's words lips over her like shadows and his gull in nothing more than a spot of something in the corner of her wavering vision. Slowly, they sink in like dull knives and each makes her tremble a little more with exhaustion as her magic takes and takes and cares little of what is left of her. “I can try,” Isra offers as bleakly as a lamb sent to slaughter.
She reaches deep down into that ocean sprawling at the very core of her. She reaches down into the current of it, over that path of stones she once walked with Eik. Down, down, down she goes and she begs the magic to come up, up, up.
Isra begs each piece of sand and loam beneath the glass to become an ant. She begs both the earth and the magic to give her any army of any, of worms, of anything that might move the glass because her legs feel made of stone instead of bone.
Nothing comes-- the dirt is still just dirt beneath all that glittering, blinding glass.
“There is nothing left. I have nothing more.”Isra laments and she turns with something like fear glittering darkly in her gaze (fear that he will look at her and see a useless queen, a slave in a unicorn skin). Just as she is about to give up and let the glass become fronds and weeds again an outline of horses crests the horizon.
The merchants and builders of Denocte have come. They have rallied to the call of king who is not their own and followed the elegant gull to the lake. Isra doesn't question the gift, only smiles at them through the quivering of her skin and the sweat dripping around her eyes. “Thank you.” It is clear she has never been more grateful for a thing in her life than the energetic faces of her court, her citizens, each of whom she loves.
Each of them needs little instructions. All of them have grown accustomed to their queen's strange dreaming ways, to the way she's is not satisfied to just let the world 'be'. So they look at the glass, and at the lake that still waits strangely still behind invisible walls, and they know almost exactly what is to be done.
Four of them gather around a panel of glass, and look to the sovereigns to see if this time they correctly guessed how odd their queen will be today.
@Asterion
