“Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it."
On each inhale she can taste wood-fern and flowers, smoke and salt. The flavors burn in her lungs like embers and for a moment she trembles with the pain, like a fresh wound that has no blood to bleed. She wonders at it then, this shiver in her heart like a crack through porcelain. She wonders that she can feel it all.
When she blinks and blots out the shine of the sunlight on his antlers with blackness, she buries the ache, the hurt, the thought that in another world without knives and magic and ichor her pain wouldn't have been pain at all. It could have been joy, a bloom instead of a barb.
Then she remembers the sunshine, the grit of sand and clover between her teeth and she inhales again. This time she tastes only summer, only heat and humidity. But when she speaks and feels brave enough to look against at the sun glinting on his bone crown there is a little of that sadness and suffering left. “What will be left when only the beautiful things remain?” Each of the words hangs in that place between their skin, and their hea,t and the things she will never say, like vines of ivy that dream of being snakes.
Fable rises pulled by those cracked strings of sorrow and love, blooms and barbs. He presses his nose against Isra's belly so that there is Lysander, and there is a dragon, and Isra is between them like a shadow made of scale. Because the dragon knows, just like Isra knows, that there is a reason she aches.
Goodbyes are never easy.
“I have been happy twice in my life.” She whispers because shadows made of scale can only whisper like smoke dissipating into the night. She thinks of the deep dark of the sea and of Eik and his bouquet of clover because both of those things are loud enough to silence that chime of goodbye that rings in her like a cracked bell.
“Lysander.” Her nose burns when she turns to tuck it against his shoulder and her ribs creak under her skin when she pulls away from him and moves closer to Fable. Between them her horn gathers sunlight like this antlers. Soon it's a pillar of gold upon her brown instead of dark, black bone. “Will you tell me a story before you go?”
She doesn't ask when she'll see him again, doesn't want to know. But she can't help but think that because she saved his life that she might have some claim to the answer.
@Lysander
