“Upon him I will visit famine and a fire, till all around him desolation rings”
At first she can only see a shaft of moonlight reflected off the blade when it moves. That silver-light burns her eyes but she refuses to look away. Isra starts to count, moments ticked off like clock-gears by the beat of her heart and each inch that moonlight coated spear moves.
Beat by beat, light by light, she counts.
One. The blade almost whistles through the air. She's sure she can hear the darkness sigh as it's rendered in two separate pieces, each as dark as that depth-less black space between two forked flames.
Two. She expects to feel that blade in her heart. She's holding her breath waiting for it. Even her heart skips a beat and her blood feels like a glacier in her veins (frozen and beyond the reign of time). She wonders if she'll wake up in the bottom of the sea. She wonder if death will peel back her skin with a scythe and remake her in another body, another form. This time she hopes death gives her wings. Isra wants to fly.
Three. Pain never comes. Nothing comes. She's still trapped in her own skin with only her mind and her fury running, running, running like a dragon across a storm-cloud. Now she can see the blade moving towards Raum, she can see him turn to fire and blood and all the things red like gore. Her heart beats again then, trembles and it rejoices in her rib-cage for the boy that fed her when she wore spiderwebs and dust instead of starlight.
Four. Raum doesn't die and the blade lands close enough to her that she can smell the metallic tang to the blood on it. It smells caustic and rotten. Isra knows she'll dream of that smell for years to come. Something lights in her then, like a newborn universe. It's locked in her by the poison (like heaven and light and epiphany) but it's there and it is bright.
Six. Her heart skipped a beat again. It's weak now, trembling and aching with the toxins running through. She stops counting
But then Raum lunges and his mouth isn't full of flat teeth but fangs. Isra starts to count them instead of her heartbeat to fight back the darkness. The blackness is coming quicker now-- quicker, and quicker, and quicker. It's rushing up to meet her like a falling star, like a comet might meet a planet.
When the first drop of blood hits her it's like darkness in her eyes, vicious and black and too thick to blink away quickly. Suddenly it's not darkness colliding with her but gore and realization. It rushes through her like fire and each drop of blood feels like a cut on her skin. Her weak magic in her blood is radiant then as if it is consuming, through her pores, every drop of magic that Acton is loosing through his blood.
Isra's magic consumes and consumes. It eats like a beast until Isra watches Acton collapse dead beside her. It stops. It breathes.
It shatters.
It explodes and she's the comet rushing up to meet a planet. She's the star running through the darkness and the dragon in a storm-cloud. If she wasn't tamed by the poison in her blood the world would have turned to a sea of stars and molten gold deep enough to drown them and melt the flesh from their bones. She would have buried them in treasure. Raum would have died then and she would have dropped her horn across Acton's cooling check and welcomed the gold, and the stars, and death.
Isra would have been happy to die then, tangled with the golden boy with kerosene in his blood.
But the toxic chains are too strong for her magic to break completely and so it runs free and shatters without her. It runs and runs until the bright thing in her body is burned out.
Each drop of Acton's blood on her body becomes a flower. The petals are slick golden and the pollen dusting them like tears is soot-black. There are petals in her eyes, petals in her chain, and flowers sprouting from her flesh like disease. And under them all there are two flowers made of metal and barbs.
She hopes Raum sees them as they promise they are, the pledge that she will come for more than his knives and his flesh. Isra will consume his soul. Dead or not she will consume him. She is the sea, she is a unicorn.
There is a universe inside of her and it wants Raum.
Isra's last thoughts are of Eik, and Acton, and retribution. Fable roars in the distance and the blackness rises up to meet her. There is only blackness to guide the dragon now and he shifts his flight path to find one of the horses that repeat across his mind like a dream.
It's the only hope the dragon has.
@Raum @Acton @
