"What is inside belongs only to the dead."
Isra almost thinks it strange that as she's hiding in her rooms, curled upon pillows and blankets and dust, it's not fear that keeps her bones rattling inside her skin. Her skin shivers with the bites of ghost flies and the sting of wilted blades that live only in a place deeper than the real. And her eyes, when she blinks and coats them in darkness, do not run with a river of tears.
It's not fear but fury that itches just under the surface of her skin. It's rage that boils in her stomach like acid, rage tainted by not fear but something feral. Tonight she doesn't feel like a slave, or a unicorn, or a queen. She feels like something else, something that stretches and moans when it wakes from an almost eternal hibernation.
Isra feels like a monster, a reaper that might open up her teeth and drink down a ghost like fermented wine.
How dare he, she thinks wildly as her magic reaches out like another feral monster. In a breath it's pillows of chain-mail that scrape against her knees instead of silk. It runs out like oil and rot from her skin, her blood, her soul until it's not her room that she's hiding in but an armory. Isra has told enough stories about heroes that she could make a bible out of what weapons she can name (her fury forgets that she has never used one, never wielded one).
Perhaps it's a blessing that when driven by her emotion her magic fades with the dripping of time instead of blood. By the time Acton scratches at the door with words instead of weapons her room is once more nothing but a room full of books, candles and soft things.
Isra does not think him a wolf at her door, not when her own skin feels stretched over wildcat bones instead of unicorn bones. Only the chain-mail pillows remain; those she loves enough to keep.
When she finally rises like a war-cry from her bed of armor and lays her cheek against the door it dissolves into ribbons of black silk shot though with pearls. Black and white, she says to herself, black like my rage and white like my vengeance.
Out loud she only says, “Acton.” And for the first time his name doesn't fall like a prayer. It burns like a blood against the back of her teeth and it tastes as bitter as bile when she swallows down the venom she could drown this entire castle in.
@Acton
