Isra and the wolf howl
"A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom.”
"A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom.”
T
he tap on her door is timid, quiet in the chorus of rage twirling like a star in her belly. Tap, tap, tap. It takes her a moment to realize that it's not Acton, returned from the gravestone clang of her door when she shut it behind him. And when she rises from her pillows of chain-mail, she almost hopes it's a crow at the door. Her magic still remembers how to make blades from stone and wire from reams of silk. It still wants too. This time she dissolves the door into glittering mesh. Another time she would have laughed to see the startled spark in the young mare's eyes. Tonight though she can't make her eyes anything but a cold, angry sea-blue. The words spark something in her that is bright, hot and hungry. Isra nods and chokes out a 'thank you' before brushing through that curtain of mesh. It turns to woven wire against her back when her magic starts to purr like a feral beast in her blood.
Sometimes she doesn't know if her magic is made to bring wonder to her court or destruction to the world.
Each of her steps is a drumbeat on the stone. Moonlight filters through the windows as she walks and the silver rays pool in her horn like blood in a needle. The chill does nothing to cool her fever, nothing to numb the sting of her teeth-mark crown. The beauty of her home is a blur tonight, trappings that the wild thing in her wants to shake off like snake-skin. She want's steel instead of silk, ore instead of marble. She want to hunt instead of walk through the hallways as a queen should.
It's the first time her duty has made her skin itch. Isra wants to run. She wants to howl at the moonlight like a wolf and let the world know that she's shifting like a skin-walker. Part of her wonders if she could change the moon to a pearl in the night-sky instead of a stone. But soon the door is opening before her and the guards are bowing out of the way. No one wants to stop their story-teller queen when she has violence in her gaze. There is no more time to wonder and think. She doesn't want to think anymore; she's had enough of being the scribe of stories.
Isra wants to be the hero now (even though she fears she's becoming the monster in the cave).
“You have information for me.” It should be a question but it's not. Each word is a sighing blade in the darkness, made of something as soft as gold but as sharp as glass. Isra speaks in the same tone in which she told stories of death and war, and blood and bone making maps in black dirt. It's all she has left now, memories of a time when there was fear in her belly instead of hate. All she has is hate and the love of a gray stallion with ghosts in his eyes.
Maybe they were both made to die.
In the soft firelight of the hearth her eyes look more like stones than eyes in the shadows pooling strangely in the sharpness of her face. And she hates that she can't help but watch him and think that he looks as almost dead as she feels. A night ago she would have offered to help him. A night ago she didn't have blood around her throat like a blood-diamond necklace.
Tonight she only has hard stone eyes, and no smile at all, for him.
@Erasmus | "speaks" | notes: <3 please excuse this grumpy Isra
