Something in her feels the sting of his teeth and thinks of home, of chains of blood thick and deep enough to drown in. That rusted chain feels heavier and the kelp brushing against her leg from it feels as sharp and heavy as a needle-tipped whip.
And in her mind that blackness of her past opens up its mouth like a sea-monster and oil (like blood) pours out.
Isra is drowning in it, that blackness, and the scales and bladed roots at her hooves melt down into slick rot and petroleum. Perhaps then it's a little bit of a beast that rises up through the blackness of her heartbreak. A beast that looks at the blood dripping like molten gold across the sword flowers rising up from the black rot, and thinks that something in her feels almost euphoric.
That is the thing that terrifies her the most, more than this ghost of horse ever could with is lion eyes and wolf teeth. Isra's afraid of how much she wants to change the walls to cannons, bricks to blades of diamond. She wants the world to devour him and all the other monsters that taste blood and want more and more and more.
Perhaps, she thinks,
I am a true unicorn after-all. Perhaps I am rage.
Even when she feels her skin (salted with sweat and fear) give beneath his teeth that monster in her chest does not cower. It growls and paces and screams for blood and death, blood and death, blood and death. It's a siren call in her heart and it smelts the cracks of her broken soul into something sharp and cold and as eternal as silver.
Raum wants more and more, she can see it in his dark eyes, in the way his skin shifts and changes like scale to protect against her nightmare flowers. She knows it in the way his breath hangs like a noose around her neck when he pulls back just long enough for her to breathe. Her blood runs like tears down her skin just as salt tears run in hot streams down her cheeks. Each drop of it that falls to the oil at their feet is laced with magic and from the drops the rock changed to oil changes again.
Great walls of amber rise up between them when he lunges towards her. They rise up just as she lunges away like a feral thing, all fear and flight and living. Her body feels hot and fragile and she shakes as she looks back at him and sees how distorted he looks through the amber (like the beast inside him stripped from its false horse skin).
But like him, Isra also wants more. She wants to grow a meadow from his bones and let all the orphans who once had no choice feast from the grass that would grow in this dark and dank alleyway.
And when she turns and runs, before that wall of amber collapses, it's that beast inside her that she's running from as much as it is Raum.
@
Raum
ISRA OF THE OIL THICK RAGE;
“It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age."
