"collecting memories of loss, like chains wrapped around my veins"
The day, as it starts to rise, does nothing for the tenseness of Isra's spine or the burn of her lungs. The pink streaks across the mountains and the golden taint across the lake are nothing more than new shadows to dip and tease in the corners of her vision. Isra still only has eyes for the thunderbirds and the way their beaks glint like sharpened blades in the dawn-light.
It's not until the first of them takes wing that the air in her lungs finally rushes out like a tide. More and more take flight and more and more air rushes out of her lungs. Some part of her, not living only in thunderbird shadows, wonders if she really breathed for the entire night. The burn in her chest suggests that she had not.
So like all great storytellers who tell stories of blood and rot she almost wilts in the silence. Adrenaline, like a beast, eats up all her remaining strength. The legs she rises onto are almost as wobbly as fawn legs, all knees and hocks and fragile tendons. Isra sways, as the last bird steps closer and breathes air hot enough to belong to a dragon across her face.
She both loves and hates the how the heat of it chases away her chills.
“But are the other courts safe from them? Where will they go now?” Her eyes blaze across Caligo's and for the first time her gaze feels colder than the surface of the moon. Frost and crystals could grow from the frozen fury and fear in her blue eyes. And when she sighs her gaze flits away to Raymond and there's a silent question there. She only hopes that the red-stallion of retribution will read the silent, sentient words in her winter eyes. Find them, they cannot be dragons for anywhere in Novus.
When she returns her gaze to the goddess and Katniss, she only smiles a smile that feels as brittle as a snowflake and says, “Thank you, but I only had to give words instead of flesh.”Isra will always remember that others already gave a pound of flesh (to the sea and to the birds) and all she's had to give so far is words and slivers of her heart. Already she's not sure what will be left of her after it's all done.
She only knows that everything about her will be changed, for better or worse nothing will remain the same.
