“It is not so easy to always remember who you are.”
Isra finds herself counting both her steps and memories are they start to walk between the booths full of silks and spices. She remembers that it took seven steps from stealing an apple to touch a boy with fire and sunshine in his eyes. It took a hundred and ten more to reach the end of the market pathways to the place where the shadows thickened and the wilderness beckoned. And when she pauses to look at a place where a moonstone has been washed loose by the tsunami she knows it's twenty paces from here to the dusty, molded corner she called home once.
She doesn't know how many steps it would take to get back to her homeland (there is no number high enough for how far she wants to be from that world).
There's something easy in walking next to Katniss, in the way her scars match all the ones on Isra's soul. Part of her knows that she could never survive as many worlds as Katniss has, not if all of them were like her first. As for the gods of this world, she has nothing more to say of them, the betrayal still cuts like a knife through her heart every time she thinks of it.
The sea was never so cruel, never so heartless and cold. Isra never had to wonder what the sea wanted because it took and took and took.
It's the talk of destructive magic that makes her break the silence and the one, two, three pattern of her counting. Something in her heart trembles to think of it and her own magic shivers out of her to shape the world around her (as if her magic denies the thought of leaving bodies and destruction instead of wonder). To think of it breaks her heart.
“Surely you're only being humble. I cannot imagine living in so many places or being born to fight.” She shifts the direction of her hooves and brushes her should against Katniss as if to say, there are secrets between us, and that's okay. It does not mean she trusts the mare any less, they all have secrets and heartbreaks that are too brutal to be formed into words and given power.
Isra knows better than most how brutal the power of words can be.
She turns towards the last bonfire of the night. The spiraled tip of her horn flashes in the red-light like a lantern when she turns back to look at Katniss. Her blue eyes follow the trail of scars across the warrior's skin. “Do you think you might be able to find purpose and more in Denocte?” Hope drips like rain from her words, so much hope that Isra could burst with it after so much heartbreak.
Fable, as if awoken from where he slept by the fire of hope in her chest, loops above the night markets in joyous spirals of flight.
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