"Night poured itself down my throat. Night was my wine and my meat."
This is the first night that Isra has felt brave enough to return to the waves. Perhaps it's the blackness of the sky that soothes her, the way the waves seem flat and icy and nothing like tidal waves. Perhaps it's nothing more than remembering how the sea gave her both new skin and a dragon.
There is no fear in her as she walks past the shore into the gaping blackness of where the world is broken up by the ocean.
Tonight, as she wades out into the shallow water of low tide, Isra feels more like a wild beast of the sea than a unicorn. Each of her steps is nothing more than a whispering song of bone, surf and sand. Her body is nothing more than a place in the night that seems thicker than the shadows and mist floating around her.
The sea feels cool against her skin and all she's happy to replace the sweat of the summer with the salt-water and brine. Fable with his belly already half full of fish starts to hum a low screeching sound (like a songbird who hasn't yet learned to sing). He dances through the darkness as if he's no longer a dragon but a shadow slipping through the almost moonless night.
Find me. He teases, dashing above Isra's head and snapping his tail gently across her back like a crop. Further out another screeching him echoes strangely in the empty silence of the almost revealed sandbar. If you can.
Isra's laughter is bright enough to be a moon when she kicks up her heels and splashes recklessly through the salt-water. Each step makes the water deep and cooler and soon she's swimming like a seal through the waves, her head held as high above the waves as she can manage so she doesn't loose track of Fable's poor song. Surely, she thinks, nothing is foolish enough to challenge a dragon of the sea.
In the darkness she never notices that each molecule of salt that brushes against her skin turns to glittering specks of silver and gold.
Soon the waves calm again and the bottom of the sea slopes upwards instead of down. Fable dives low and nips at her horn (the only part of her that gleams in the little light there is). “Pesky dragon.” The words are too loving to be harsh and they are quickly drowned out by the hiss of sand as she starts to gallop across the island shore.
All she notices is the place where the darkness gathers and seems blacker underneath Fable's wings. She never notices the frosted hoof prints that she's running across or the way something ahead flashes white like a sword.
Isra never notices him at all. Fable does though, and his playing hum turns to a low hiss as he lands between the stallion and the unicorn.
Neither of them expected to find anything but birds and sea and sand tonight.
@Amaroq
