"Just like you chose your path on the beach: to lose your heart is not a path for the faint and fainting.”
Like most nights it is the sea that Isra dreams of as she sleeps.
Tonight however the sea isn't a peaceful thing that buoys up her body like she is a cloud and it is air instead of brine. This dream ocean doesn't feel like satin and sugar against her skin. There are no stars above the ocean in her dreams tonight, no constellations or moon to light her way in sea-foam and silver.
Tonight the sea is ravenous in her dreams. Tonight it's a drowning sea and it fills her lungs like oil as the waves drag her down, down, down-- down until she's more awake than she has ever been.
Isra rises with a scream and her skin is slick with sweat. The chain-mail pillows as they dig almost cruelly into her belly are the only things that ground her in this ephemeral place between dream seas and castle walls. Her lungs feel as fragile as dragon-fly wings and they dance just as frantically against her rib cage (wings and petals and bones). Inhale and exhale. She tells herself between shivers of her skin. Inhale and exhale, I am not drowning. I am not a slave and the sea does not have me, not tonight.
But then her skin starts to feel not like skin but like rope and magnets. It pulls at her, stretches and oh! Oh! Oh! She thinks that the sea might have her after-all.
That rope is a thick as anchor rope and when she lashes against it like a unicorn might lash against a fence it sinks into her like wire and needles and blades. Isra cries then, wild tears that turn to diamonds on her cheeks and ring like nails on glass when they fall to the stone floor. Her rope and magnet skin pulls her up from her armor bed, and it tugs and pulls until she's running down the stairs. Isra knows that this rope will pull her on her side or on her feet. She's determined to meet the sea god bravely in the body that he made for her. She knows (in her heart and soul) that the sea calls her now so that it might take back this body and so that she might find the true death that she wanted so long ago.
And so she runs faster than she ever has and her joints scream in protest as she leaps over dying bonfires and flees heedlessly over rock and through thicket.
Isra runs until she meets the tide. Diamond tears still pour from her eyes, an offering of sorrow and wealth that the waters sweep away like dust and rot. Tonight the water feels like ice as it boils at her feet and sings her deeper and deeper into the shallows.
She almost gives in to the pull and collapses to the sand so that the sea might drag her out to the darkness like a corpse. Isra almost welcomes death when she licks her lips and tastes salt and cold, diamond tears.
But then! Then!
The waves groan and froth moon-light silver instead of frothy white. Each waves dances with star shine and streamers of seaweed billow from them like the flags of a million different nations. Isra is instantly enchanted and the next breath in her lungs doesn't taste like air and brine at all. It tastes like a dream and her skin quivers with wonder. Surely, she almost thinks, she's not awake at all but in some strange dream inside a hundred other dreams.
Her rope skin tugs again and her knees buckle with the violence of this last, feral pull. And when the egg rises, finally, from the sea it's the tip of her horn that meets it instead of her ocean gaze.
This is not death, she thinks (although another part of her knows that a unicorn will always meet their death with the tip of their horn). “This is life.” She says and her voice billows like steam against the smooth curve of the egg. Her heat awakens the egg. As the creature inside it stretches against the pearl-hide shell, something stretches mighty wings against the inside of Isra's soul.
Isra's magic rises with the heat inside her (and those wings fluttering against her soul) and at its touch the egg changes from pearl to paper. Soon it's not barnacles and seaweed and salt that cover the shell but ink, curls and curls of ink that run like tears down the thin, paper sides. The words run and reform, over and over again, and even though Isra cannot possibly read them all she knows the story of them is being burned across every inch of her bones (deeper than skin and deeper than muscle).
Finally there are no more words and without ink the paper seems as clear as glass and Isra can finally glimpse inside the egg. “Oh!” She sighs like a mother as the form inside the paper unfurls like a flower.
A head bursts through first. Then a swan-thin neck. Then wings and a tangle of legs unfold and the paper shreds to pieces before the sea reclaims it. The dragon turns (a dragon! She rejoices even as she laments) and their eyes meet for the first time.
Later, when she thinks back to this very moment, Isra will swear that even the tide held its breath as her body shattered and reformed all at once.
And as everything in her restitches after imploding, a word passes between the dragon and the unicorn.
Fable, he thinks at exactly the exact moment that Isra sings, like a siren, “Fable.”
Because this, they both instinctively know, is more than just a story of ink and paper.
@Random Events
