“I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me.”
If his horn had swung, like a divining rod, towards anything else but her city on the hill Isra would have smiled to watch it shine like moon-stone instead of bone. Instead she watched it swing and something in her heart swings with it before clanging like an anvil instead her rib-cage. It sinks like rage in her marrow, a stone through oil.
A month ago she would have echoed the swing of his horn with her own. She would have whispered to him what constellations would have lead him up to those bonfires and gemstone streets. Isra would have brushed her lips to his cheek and said on a single inhale, you are home.
If she were to lift up her horn like a weapon instead of a map, it would not have stung a month ago.
She almost has it in her to lament the black coil of hate and caution in her heart, almost swallows down her acid of rage and steps closer to him. Fable though, saw the smile Isra missed and he knew what it meant. Not for long, the dragon says in the silent way of ocean monsters and Isra, hearing it cocks her head like a seal and wonders. She wonders of beasts and dragon and unicorns who call themselves refugees.
“It is even lovelier in the center of it.” Each word is as much a warning as each of his words is a slow glacier moving through a black sea. Isra does step closer and she's unsure if it's the soft bloom of doubt in her heart, or the way his gaze looks deeper than any sea she knows, that makes her steps bold instead of cautious.
Or maybe it's just the way the sand around her hooves turns to oil and wire and the way a dragon takes to the skies before her in a spray of salt and sand.
Isra is learning that she can be dangerous too.
There is something that suggests, when she brings their noses close enough to touch and speaks, that she wants to count his teeth (so that she might remember the number she'll have to pluck out). “Where is it that you are a refugee from Amaroq?” When her eyes flash and when Fable roars it's easy to wonder if she is as much a story-teller as he is a traveler.
These days it's easy to feel like a unicorn if not a queen.
@Amaroq
