“If I told you I'm trying to save the world, would you believe me?”
Isra should have turned and walked back towards Denocte.
There are still winter-flakes of poison in her veins. It's not enough to cool the deep magic in her, or keep her legs for moving. But it is enough to make all of her ache as she walks down from the mountains on a trail stained with blood and something that smells acidic and wrong.
She is hunting, and she cannot find it in herself that care that she promised to return home (to safety). Tonight she doesn't want comfort and she doesn't want healing.
Isra wants what her magic wants. They want vengeance, and justice, and war. They want to crumble the rotten parts of the world (and a certain ghost's bones) and turn them to clay. The magic wants to make feasts out of dead-trees. Isra wants see just how quickly she can turn a tree into a blade and just how slowly she might turn flesh to stone.
Perhaps her magic is the most innocent part of her now. It might have been better if the poison leached out all her magic too. But it didn't and it's a stronger river of it that runs like wildfire with the rage in her heart.
Ahead Fable leads her onward, crashing through the trees and over the stone like a river. The deer paths are too small for him now and the trees fall like soldiers before him. Isra only smiles and touches each crumbled oak and pine in his trail. She makes them all into apple trees that will bloom with ruby-red fruit. Once she would have cared about his destruction, once she would have been afraid to follow a dragon through the mountains.
Once she was afraid of violence too.
Now it's violence that leads the dragon and the unicorn onward. The ghost might have left the mountains long ago, he might have turned his flesh to a hundred different things so that tracking him wasn't easy. They might not be moving quickly on the trail and Isra already knows that they have looped back on their path more than once. But they never stop moving and that violence never stops growing, and growing, and growing inside them.
It feels like they are walking towards war. Their hearts sing in their skin like drums and the wind screams through her horn like a trumpet. On and on they go, looping like a river (unstoppable and faster, faster, faster).
I can smell blood. It's fresh. Fable almost howls the words in the sea of rage they share. But something in his instincts tells him that the blood, that makes the air metallic, is not rotten. This blood isn't familiar to him and so instead of taking to the skies like a dragon should he only turns back to Isra so that she might read caution in the tense curl of his neck.
Isra doesn't pause though and she only quickens her steps towards the low-ground, ducking under Fable's wing as she gallops past him.
At first all she can see if blood, a trail of it (a river of it). All she can think of is rage and the phantom taste of foxglove that makes her tongue burn. But when she sees the body and the claw marks something in her heart shatters and then remakes itself into steel thick enough to hold back the rage just a little.
Her hooves are feathers over the sand and the dirt. Diamonds bloom like daisies in her wake as she circles the mare. When she fills her mouth with dirt and sprinkles it over the wounds each piece of sand turns to a drop of antiseptic, medicine made with magic and intent alone (and maybe empathy too). After, she grabs what sticks and grass and small stones she can find. She lays each gently over the wounds and the moment they touch blood and medicine they each turn to bandages made of silk.
Just as she drops her nose to the other mare's throat (she's looking for teeth marks of course) Fable joins them. He raises his wings over them and his eyes blaze like a predator's as he watches the battlefields around them for further dangers.
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