“You don’t have to say everything to be a light."
It makes her almost jealous to watch him wink and drape himself in brightness. There is something in him that suggests, to her, the dawn. Perhaps another horse wouldn't have noticed the too bright way his teeth flash in his golden smile. They might not have heard the sun in his laugh and the whisper of eternity in his voice.
But Isra is a golden horse in a unicorn skin and she is a story-teller who drowned in the sea. She wants to write in him ink, put to word the way all the layers and layers of him already make her ache. There is a story already pooling behind her teeth, black script that makes a sea of ink.
Suddenly she doesn't want to run anymore, not today, not when the fury is sleeping instead of roaring in her bones. “As long as I have been free.” Isra taps her hoof until her chain sings like a cracked bell. It stings when it taps against her joints. Her attempt at matching his smile fails and looks strange on her lips (as if they are made for sorrow instead of joy).
“But,” She steps closer, until they are almost shoulder to shoulder. “I'm learning how good stillness can be.” Almost do the words of ghosts and mountains and poison slip through her lips. She almost tells him answers to all the questions that no one yet knows to ask her.
Maybe it's his steady walk and his silence that make her feel almost easy in her own skin. It has been too long since she's felt so easy without the night-sky overhead. Whatever it is she can't help the way her hooves already move in the same direction as his.
Her own smile when she tries it again is dim compared to his own but it looks a little less strange on her lips. “I am Isra.” Her chain still sings softly between her words, as if that piece of steel hates the silence as much as she loves it. “Are you sure you live here?” She laughs at his almost hesitation and it feels like fire cutting through that still there sea of ink behind her teeth.
At her hoof a single blade of grass turns to a snow-white owl feather, and she's too busy looking at the brightness of him to notice.
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