“I can't go on, I'll go on.”
Of course she is in the room that looks like the sea.
Everyone is looking for her in the gardens, at the mask covered tables or perhaps in a corner weaving a story to anyone brave enough to listen. Only those who know her closely might thing to look here, but tonight they are all off weaving their own adventures.
Tonight Isra is alone.
Although perhaps, she thinks, this room feels a little like home and a little like drowning in gold and green and strange, shifting light. The silk winding about her neck (hiding the still there wounds) and flowing down over her shoulders before pooling at her side looks as if it is made from the walls of this room. Each stitch glitters in the low-light, and there are a million of them, and each stitch curves to make a scale. The sheer fabric ripples like fish-skin as she moves beneath the hanging aquariums.
Each ring of her hooves across the marble rings like a bell. She fills the room with a melody that only she knows the words too. Over and over she moves between the walls with the light streaming through the suspended orbs of water reflecting on her horn. Eventually she starts to hum a low, sad tune and her skin feels alive with the electricity of it.
Isra hums and thinks of the sun and how a dune of sand might swelter and burn beneath it. She thinks of metal flowers and blood as red, red, red as the color of her heart. Ghosts, dragons, thunderbirds and drowning: she thinks of so many things and each makes her tune a slower and lower. A tear falls down and glistens faintly on the fabric rippled around her hooves and her dance falters just a little.
“How strange,” she sobs to the quiet room with only fish to keep her company,. “that I have no words for this story.” There is nothing here but shadows and scale to answer her back, not that Isra expected any reply at all.
But then, there is the sound of hoof-steps in the hallway and she blinks back her sorrow and her song and tries so very hard to look like a queen instead of a unicorn hiding the mark of teeth across her throat.
@Avilius
