"ghosts crowded around you, weeping silver tears, waiting for you with such smiles. "
Isra, for the first time she can remember, is glad Acton never touched her. Her eyes feel like they belong to something else when she watches him reach for her. The bloom of relief that bursts in her heart when he drops his nose terrifies her. If he touched her, Isra thinks, she might had tried to pluck out any crow feathers left in his heart.
She might have run him through with her horn.
“Ah,” She says and there is some great revelation of darkness and fury that shifts like the tail of a dragon across her eyes. It curls into the whites of her eyes and for a moment her pupils might look as black as any ore of the underworld. Isra blinks, hoping that all that darkness might recede back onto sea-foam and scale-shine. It doesn't.
“And I am only a weapon newly forged.” That burst of darkness reverberates in her belly, roaring like a cougar though her blood, the marrow of her bones, and the jagged edges of her soul. Isra wants to tell him that she was born in blood and violence, fear and helplessness. She wants to tell him that she's drank her own blood when the nobles of her homeland kicked in her teeth.
Isra wants to tell him how lungs full of blood can sing and gurgle and sound like the sea.
Instead she only lets the moonlight fall through the windows like snow and cling to the curves of her horn. She almost wonders if the cold light makes her look innocent or cruel, until she realizes that tonight she doesn't care what Acton thinks of her.
“Why are you here, Acton?” The flower at her feet turns to a sword, then a bed of pearls, then a spike of amber with small black specks in it that almost look like charred bones. “Have you come to tell me that he will kill me?”
She doesn't tell him that she's already imagined a hundred ways to bury a ghost and toss the ashes to the wind so there will be no resurrection.
But part of her wants to tell him, if only to see the look in his eyes.
@Acton
