"and if you see a fire from the shore tonight, it’s my chains going up in flames."
Isra sets sail on the currents of Moira's words. Each cold word is a drop of water against the hull of her and each passionate promise a summer breeze billowing her her sails. Everything is soothing, a lulling hum of surf and sea and love flowing in that place between her bones and her soul. And when she blinks her eyes the blood and brine seem only like a nightmare.
Surely this sweetness should be the only real thing in their world. There is no darkness here, not when Isra smiles and traces the pattern of Moira's wings at her side (no darkness between them, only light).
Her own throat feels like fire when Moira tucks her head underneath her and begs silently for comfort. This, Isra thinks as she drops her neck across the other mare and hums, is the moment I truly became a queen. For the first time she knows it's not bravery she will lead with (she's not that sort of unicorn), but empathy. Isra will bleed a river for each drop of Denocte's suffering.
Even now she thinks back to a dead forest filled with fat graves heavy with bone and char and frost. Beneath her belly her hooves ache with the need to keep running, to keep being a wild ghost of the forest instead of a monarch. Her horn aches too, when the rising sun glints through a window across the point of it. It aches for all the time it's been nothing more than a useless twist of bone upon her brown.
It aches. It wants.
“Never again will a place be called cruel, not when I have air in my lungs and blood in my heart.” She twines the words into Moira's mane like rotten flowers still full of seed and pollen. Isra, like a unicorn, promises not art but a world.
Once in a book she read, If you don't like the world you are in, make another. Here, twisted about Moira the memory burns like embers in her skin with the fury of those words.
Just before sleep starts to take away the fury and lingering heartbreak in her gaze, she presses her lips like a brand across Moira's brow. To her it feels like that touch scalds. “Someday we will sail there, you and I. Someday we will tear down every wall that ever thought to be cruel and made of horrors.” Her voice grows heavy with sleep and her belly feels full of porridge and weak joy. But still she manages to promise, “For you, I will start in Dencote.”
And of course, unicorns promises are more than words. They are blood. They are heart.
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