“We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.”
By the time the night has reached it's lowest hour, just as the sky is dark enough to sing, Isra (as if she is the night-sky) has started to bend low before her own exhalations. Every drop of magic in her bones has turned to dust and rust and it feels like sharp, scaled beasts are swimming through the seas of her blood. Her eyes are desert dry and the whites of them, when she looks at the stars with sorrow, are shot through with crimson bolts of blood-lightning.
And in her weakness even the dull-throb of aging teeth marks at her throat feels like nothing more than a needle in a wave of knives.
The tall, prairie grass tickling the pale scales on her belly are just grass, nothing else. Although she does, when she looks towards the mountains and remembers that look in Acton's eyes, imagine that the hill would be almost lovely covered in rapier blades as tall as trees. All her magic can do is turn one blade out of the hundred to steel that is bendable, dull and weak.
She should be afraid to be so dead in the ocean of grass. She should be cautious of the heavy darkness and the fading stars (winking out one by one, like fireflies). But that hum of Fable's dreams in the brightest corner of her mind only makes her brave. She forgets that she's nearly alone in the twisted, melting remains of her maze.
Isra's long since lost track of time as the stars sink around her and the skies darken to something blacker than black. Her eyes flutter behind in her lid, in and out of dreaming and nightmare and reality. The pattern of her lungs ebbs and crests like a tide. It's not until it peaks and she's ready to bed down in the meadow like wild-thing instead of a queen that a colt joins the cicadas in breaking the silence.
It feels like floating through oil to lift open her eyes and smile. Perhaps if he was older he would have seen the cracks in her gaze, the prints of heartbreak not yet healed, a glow of love that still shines brighter than her scales in the moonlight, or the way she tucks her nose to hide the wounds and dirt coating her neck like satin.
“Perhaps you could bring me some water?” Isra offers when the colt asks her if she needs anything. When she watches him go she begs her magic to rise like a river in her blood again so that she might make a stone into a meal for him. Because even though her bones feel like water and glass Isra still isn't content with the way the world is.
Nothing happens and the night still ticks onward, careless of the unicorn drowning in darkness.
@Raum
