“Confront them with annihilation, ”
Every sting of a hornet makes her thinks of a lash dipped in metal and acid. There are a hundred stinging wounds on her body that are swelling quickly. But she has known a thousand lashes in her life, and chains ground down to sharp points instead of smooth turns. This pain is nothing. She has died for more pain than this.
When the hornet fly out of the cave towards fresh air and flowers Isra misses the pain of their stingers.
She smiles bright and hot and lifts her gaze to the colt and the ghost. There is an ocean in her gaze, a storm-sea. Gone is the night queen full of stories, gone is the unicorn who loved the stars fiercely. They have made a siren of her, a sea-serpent that's coiling at the bottom of the sea waiting to strike.
They have made her a monster and then they cut the chains. Foolish boys.
Raum makes himself a horn, pale as bone, and she almost laughs. “I have died before. Have you?” Her laughter is manic, cold and cruel. Some part of her, buried deep, cries for the harshness she's growing to love. It's a part that's being buried deeper and deeper with each clanging clash of their horns as they battle.
The ghost tell his boy to run and Isra's magic is there, hateful and wild. She almost makes a cage from the mouth of the cage. She wants to trap him here with them. She wants to see what death tastes like on her tongue. Would it taste like brine this time? Would it taste like blood? The urge to know festers inside her like boiling oil.
Raum lunges again with a crown of antlers and she's distracted enough to let the boy run for this freedom. But she won't forget him, she will not. The poison has left her weaker than she should be and where it not for that beast of magic she would be dead already, dashed to gore beneath those tines. Isra thinks of Fable while she dives backward to avoid the points of bone. A tine catches on her nose as she pulls away. Blood starts to drip from her like ruby tears. She keeps moving backward until she can feel the cool wall at her hocks.
Her dragon is still coming for her and he's showing her images of Raum hanging from his jaws like seaweed. His roar echoes like distant thunder outside, he's furious. But he's also showing her an image of a gray stallion running below him.
The image of Eik cools her rage and turns it to panic. Raum would kill Eik too, if she gave him the chance.
Isra is done playing this game of death.
Her magic cracks out like a lash from her and she almost sighs with the relief she feels to let it out, out, out. All the stalagmites and stalactites around them turn to metal pillars, shining silver and bright in the dim light. Each rock tumbling around their hooves turn to sharp blades. A large rock to her left turns into metal pointed towards Raum's rib-cage. But it's the pillars of metal that she pours most of her magic into. They cage him in like metal teeth hanging from mouth of a black, hungry beast.
The ceiling of the cave starts to tremble as she turns every loose stone that was waiting to fall to a blade. She makes each blade look like the one he had before she turned it to a daisy. Isra makes flowers out of the stone too, Acton's flower.
She smiles and it looks almost sad. “It won't be you that kills me Raum.”. Outside Fable lands on the mountain outside the cave. He's shaking his head back and forth like a rabid dog at the throat of a rabbit. The cave is too small to hold him. He roars and the cave moans with a dragon's fury.
Then the cave starts to rain on Raum, a storm of flowers and blades.
@Raum @
