"if I touch near the fire, the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you"
Under the sunlight there is only fire between them, hot and consuming. It flicks at her ribs in touches that sting and smolder. It wraps around her heart and squeezes tight like a cobra until Isra thinks that she might be the sun instead of a the moon and the scales on her flesh petals of flowers instead of constellations. And for the first time she thinks that being ash upon the breeze might not be so terrible a way to find freedom.
Perhaps it's the violence still stretching out in her bones that makes her feel hotter than a dune of sand under the sun. Perhaps it's the passion and the want that trembles ravenously through her as he lips at her cheek. Isra feels almost wild then, almost tame, almost like a flame rooted in the center of the universe.
She feels holy against him.
Her skin could be sermons written to him and her blood could be wine coursing sweetly through her veins. She is ink and love and god-like things that are ephemeral and eternal. Isra is his and he is her new religion.
If she had his magic she would have told him he wasn't a shipwreck but sea, silvered by moonlight against a desert shore. There was never any choice but this, but Eik, but sun and flame and slow-rage that is hot as love. She twines her love with his fire like seaweed. There is between them a cool sea upon which a pyre burns. And each of his words lights another pile of kindling in her heart.
“Do not.” She demands and almost regrets that she's learning how to be a queen instead of a unicorn. The tinkling of the stained-glass branches ring sweetly above them and her heart feels like charred sugar when he doesn't look back quickly enough. And perhaps it's the violence she's learning that sets her teeth to his shoulder. Perhaps it's fear that she tastes only sand and smoke between her teeth.
“Don't look away from me.” Her teeth turn gently to kiss and her lips tug and tangle on his name. Each pull sends her heart to crying, do not ask and look away. How strange it is that for a moment she feels like a heroine, a brave thing that laughs at a storm too bright for others to look at.
And perhaps then, their love is not a cool sea but a fire-storm, a thing that will burn them to ash and resurrect them into something new, something raw. Words build between then, floating bits of smoke and soot that Eik could pick out like blades from her mind. It is for love that I turned blades to daisies. You make me brave.
Isra lifts her lips to his ear and her horn rises above their heads like the base of a cross. The sun dances over them in colors and warmth and song. “I would follow you to the end of the world.” And even the sun and the song are not as warm as her words.
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