"are there any chances left for us?"
Violence crests inside her like waves against the shoreline of her salted, blooded skin. It rises again and again until Isra thinks that if she were to dive back into the sea inside of her she would drown there, and drown the entire world too. There is seaweed tangling inside her like chains and each knot of brine carried with it dead crustaceans and other broken secrets of the deep.
Isra feels like there is another world living in the marrow of her now, cold and void of any color at all. Everything at her feet blackens as the edges and the stone turns to dust that coats the tip of her tail in ash. Her horn feels like it could be made of galena and ore instead of bone (it feels battered and hungry). And it feels like a revelation that her horn would want and hunger and need. It feels black, black as a universe.
The smile that curves her lips is crueler than her horn and more vicious than any monster in her stories. She hates that she can smile like this as much as she loves how it feels like panels of iron armor between them. And she wields it like a weapon, clumsy and violent, as she steps fully into the beam of moonlight between them. “You're right.” She wishes she could turn her words to blades as easily as she can turn silk into chain-mail. Tonight she would turn the air to shards of glass, bright and sharp and edged in blood.
“I already knew.” Isra knew the moment she dipped her horn and instead of changing oil to water she turned weapons into flowers. Like a dead, dying thing she knew, she knew, she knew.
Each bit of moonlight glints on her like steel and diamonds and slick, bright blood. It puddles like oil in the wounds across her throat and in the hollow curls of her horn. It feels like winter and tonight she wants to be a glacier, deep and impenetrable. “No. I'm not okay. How could I be?” She wants to say she's better, she's colder, she's a sea. Instead she only follows the ghost of his gaze to the place where the mountains bleed dark and terrifying into the night sky.
Something blooms inside her to look into that darkness. It feels like a battlefield between then, black and steep and full of old graves.
“You should go.” The door turns back to black silk and pearl beads and her gaze never leaves the abyss of the night sky.
@Acton
