“The old, defiant chant rose in her mind: If I want, I will fight. If I want, I will live. And I want. And I will.
Time has become a corporeal thing to her, a thin miasma of the world that moves in patterns unrecognizable to her. All she has to count her moments are heartbeats that each bring to her lips the taste of iron and brine. On and on they go, seconds and minutes and hours. Maybe she loses days too, there in the forest with a canopy of dragon wings and seawater instead of leaves.
All Isra does know is that she's has lost count of the times she's changed the bandages. Her teeth feel brittle in her dead-smile, caked with dirt and greenery. The skin on her knees is bloody and raw because the ground where she lays has long since turned to chain-mail when she let her rage run rampant beneath the surface of her skin while she worked.
It almost worries her that she hasn't found the new bottom of her magic-- almost.
Sometimes fitful dreams run across her eyes lids and their prints are clawed and hoofed and sharp. Sometimes Fable lifts back a wing and she can feel cool starlight rush over her skin like water. Sometimes it's saltwater that runs over her like tears when a fever of worry starts to rise over her skin. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes there are other things but there is always a unicorn, a dragon and a mare with silk bandages and iron blood. That is the only thing that never changes.
But finally her heart flutters in her chest like a prayer at the lips of a god when the mare moves. The mare's eyes flip open like a casket. Isra can feel the blackness of those pupils rising the hair on her back when she has no name but not there for the look the other mare's eyes. She wonders if this is how it feels to look death in the eye, swallow, and say No.
Maybe it is, for the mare is saying her denials over and over again like a hallelujah of suffering. Isra doesn't know if she's begging for death or for life and for a moment she wants to shutter those dark eyes so that her own sea-deep gaze might not ache for meeting them. But she swallows down the grit on her teeth and forces herself to smile like an angel might when the once-dying mare speaks.
“You aren't saved yet.” She whispers while they meet sea to blackness, silver and bay, iron blood to salted blood. The satin bandages are still blooming with blood that looks like ink-blots on the cream-white. Her magic is still hungry with the need to change, to consume and Isra cannot help but hope that the only thing the feeling means is that fate isn't done with her yet.
She hopes that it doesn't mean a universe of a monster is opening up its jaws inside her.
And it's because she pondering that thing in her, that seems to have no bottom, that she misses the way the mare lurches to her feet. She's too busy looking inward, deeper and deeper, to all the ways she is changing. This is not how it felt t save a life before; this feels like playing god and angel and devil all at once.
Fable is the one to alert her that the mare is moving. She drags herself outward quickly and violently and later she'll tell herself that is the reason her voice rose from her lips as sharp as a sword. “Stop.” It's a queen that looks at the mare now, all the unicorn has been devoured by magic and empathy and rage.
Ahead of them a rock turns into a wall and Fable drops a wing to block the path onward. His head shakes like a dog of a underworld, back and forth with froth and sea-water foaming at his lips. They both know that recklessness in this place means death.
“You'll die before you make it to the summit. Dead things cannot fix anything.” Isra moves to join her and the chain-mail underneath her ripples like a wave. It sings like one too in that silence between one step and the next. There is no one in this world that knows how to be 'dead' as well as she does or how to rise from that dark place to burn. And maybe that's why her smile looks a little dangerous when she says, “Let me help you.”
Two dead things will always see the world as it really is as they rise, and rise, and rise from the darkest depths of the world (and of themselves).
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