Isra with the war-drum heart
“Move swift as the Wind and closely-formed as the Wood. Attack like the Fire and be still as the Mountain.”
“Move swift as the Wind and closely-formed as the Wood. Attack like the Fire and be still as the Mountain.”
I
sra wants to tell the broken mare that she does not think that her god will answer her either. She also looks at the gold shining bright where blood and torn flesh should be. And looking at that she thinks, what need have we of gods? But Isra swallows down the words like bile and her soul nudges at all the cracks in her heart cut out with words like betrayal, and religion, and peace. She knows the mare needs hope to carry her feet up, up, up the steep and sloping path. Her own gait matches the slow, swaying steps of the mare. It feels so strange her to her, to walk instead of run, to feel something like softness when she was starting to feel only rage, and fury, and something darker that that. On the other-side Fable tries so very hard to move slowly and not shake the footing inside his shadow loose. I could carry her. It would be faster.
Not yet, she needs to walk I think.She replies because she would need to walk too.
Isra is done with being saved.
So she walks on, and on, and she ignores the way the mare's voice shakes and trembles like bones in the wind (because she understands, oh, she understands). Her magic slumbers in her bones as she waits and she forget to count her steps. All she does is look up towards the mountains and wonders what she would do if they found gods hiding up beyond the low layer of clouds. She thinks, maybe, that she might turn their altars to sculptures of elk and thunder-birds. She thinks she might turn their stones to flakes of snow and flowers that say, we know now, we know what you are.
It takes her a moment to realize that there are words between them now in stead of silence and hooves on rock and loam. Perhaps it's terrible that at first she skips right over the name Seraphina and lands on Solterra. First she thinks of Eik (she always thinks of Eik).
But when she circles back around, there is no relief at having a name to put to her companion. There is only a sharp cut that forms on her heart, and a low smolder that makes her shiver in the cooling air. Isra listens, and listens, and her in her wake small shards of sharp rust catch the wind where there was once only grass and dirt.
Isra is stuck on that name Raum and it circles in her mind like leaves caught in a river's eddy. It circles and circles through her mind like a snake eating it's own tale. It circles, circles, circles and just as it's about to break she listens to Seraphina talk about Denocte, and crows, and war. She wants to feel bad, she wants to say she understands but she can't. Not now, not with all this fury running through her like a tornado. Oh how it runs faster than a meteor in her blood.
Fable tenses like a dragon should (like one of the old dragons of the night sky). His eyes flash white with sea-foam and his skin ripples with a storm like a wave in high-wind. He too remembers that name Raum and it is the first thing in this world that Fable has learned to hate. Unconsciously he flaps his wings as a hundred different instincts flare up in him. They say fly, protect, defend. And maybe they say kill too, but Isra is too lost in her own dark thing running through her to notice what words are living inside her dragon.
“He will not succeed.” There is no doubt as to what her voice sounds like now. It's poetry written with steel and inked with blood. It's a hundred stories of war bound in leather and dotted with tears. It's rage, it's fire and it beats in tune with her heart-beat that is now a war-drum. A hundred more blades of rust crack and flake in the wind as the land before them starts to sweep up towards the places where the gods first taught her how to grow a bloom of rage in her heart.
And that thing in her that was circling like a shark around what little was left of the word forgiveness, finally implodes. It collapses about itself like a sun and she burns. Isra burns and her magic rushes out from her like a wave.
“I am Isra, Queen of the Night Court.” Her teeth flash like stars and small moons in her sneer as she looks behind them towards where Raum might even now be destroying a hundred more lives. For the first time her title feels like more than a chain she wasn't quite ready for. It feels like a calling, like the reason the sea washed her up on a shore instead of carrying down into the deep dark.
“And I promise you that in the end he will not succeed.” The look in her eyes promises blood, and vengeance, and justice. It promises death. There is nothing left of the unicorn that filled all Seraphina's wounds with gold. Now she looks more than a unicorn who will take life before she saves it.
And oh, oh, she should be worried that she loves this dark, violent craving that is rising in her like a tidal wave against a cliff.
She thinks then of Acton and how his blood felt like hot tears against her throat when he died. She recalls how his eyes always looked like smoke and fire and all the things left after the words has burned. Isra wants to be like his eyes, those eyes that looked at her covered in dust, fearful of the light and said this is something worth saving.
That war-drum song that has replaced her heartbeat thrums and beats and throbs in her chest. Her magic is still rushing out like waves from her and the world is trembling and changing. The world is becoming like that dark and dangerous thing inside her.
Isra pauses (she doesn't know that she looks like a lion ready to pounce) and her horn flashes in the shadows of the mountain like a star, bright and sharp and hot. “You will not be alone when it comes time to free your nation. Raum has more crimes than this new one to answer for, and I promised myself that I would collect justice from him” The words, from his corpse, almost slip past her small moon teeth but she swallows those. They taste like soot and cinder instead of bile.
Fable is still watching them both and all the words are still moving around inside him like a current.
Her hoof, once poised like a blade above a throat, falls to the ground again. She starts to walk again, keeping her pace slow despite the fury that is yelling at her to run, run, run until the hard dirt becomes sand. A mission is a mission after-all and Seraphina deserves to figure out what form her own vengeance will take.
Isra's magic already knows what the unicorn's price will be.
Around them all the trees have become weapons. An oak is now a sword, rising silver and sharp towards the sky. A rock is now a pile of chains, rusted and coated in seaweed. The broken branches and leaves that once littered the ground around them are arrows, feathered and shining.
Isra doesn't notice what her magic has wrought and she if did---
If she did, she would have understood that they have no need for gods.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: we will have an actual book at the end of this
