“She said you’d come and I swore to eat your heart.”
Isra, at first, sees only a unicorn glimmering like ice in the moonlight. She sees only the whiteness of his tail twisting like a cat's in the sand. The first through that crosses her mind is, oh, I bet he knows how to wield his horn better than I. Her second is, I wonder if it aches sometimes as mine is oft to?. It takes watching to dip of it tracing out the lines of her young dragon to turn all the questions burning on her tongue to dust.
Fable, on the other hand, does not see a unicorn shining like a star in the gloom of the blackness. He sees a bestial nature lurking beneath seal-skin, one that echoes the bits and pieces of the predator laying dormant and quiet under his scales. There is in his gaze, when he looks at the unicorn who is not-a-unicorn, a challenge befitting an creature that is destined to be the apex-predator of the Novus seas.
But of course he shares nothing of this with Isra. Fable only snakes his head back and forth and tries to shed his tameness like outgrown snake-skin.
The night queen watches him with something near horror in her gaze and she moves closer to press her lips against cool, salted scale. Enough. It's the coldest thing she's ever said to him and that alone chills the feverish challenge in his green eyes.
Isra continues on past him until she's close enough to count the number of dark dapples on the unicorn's skin and the number of times his horn spirals around and around. She smiles and her teeth shine flat and neat in the silver-light. Her own head echoes his slow nod and she's glad as she still remembers the last stallion she met on a dark night for the horn on her brow and the dragon at her back.
But then he speaks before her and she catches the flash on a fang against his lips and all her easiness dissolves like smoke on the wind. The color of her eyes darkens to something like the bottom of a wave on a new moon.
Isra doesn't need to look to know what city shines bright golden on the hill as if a million stars and fires have gathered into one tiny universe. She refuses to look anywhere but at the curl of his neck and the point of her horn and she's ready, ready, ready. Although she doesn't know what exactly it is that she's ready for).
“Mine.” She almost growls and almost finds it in her regret the cold fury that still lingers in her heart. Almost.
It's a challenge for her to swallow down that fury and pretend that she's not a wolf baring her teeth at at bear. It costs her but she manages to blink back a little of the darkness in her gaze. “That city is mine.” The sand around her hooves evens out and turns to glass blacker than space. When she takes a step closer it groans and cracks in strange spiraling shapes that fill with pearl dust. “Who are you?” And at last she finally manages to sound civil by reminding herself that she's not a weapon of war (no matter how much she's starting to crave it when faced with fanged creatures).
@Amaroq
