Isra in burnished gold
“Hers is a timeless life weaving through other longer lives like a flash of lightning in a clouded evening sky.”
“Hers is a timeless life weaving through other longer lives like a flash of lightning in a clouded evening sky.”
T
he wall is looming before her like a mighty beast made of stone. It's red and dusty and Isra almost feels tiny standing before it with the desert stretching on endlessly behind her. For a moment she looks at it, for a moment she doubts herself. What does she know, after-all, about war?But she knows how to move like a a cobweb in the breeze, invisible except for the feeling of it gossamer thin but consuming. She knows how to be as thin as a shadow stretching out too far in the noon-time. Isra knows how to be a ghost, a mist on the sea that starts slowly until it's a fog that blinds and swallows ships whole. Once, she was invisible and today she'll be nothing more than another body in the crowed, supposed but never known.
Overhead Fable is flying circles in the heavy, low clouds that would have promised rain back home. Isra doesn't know what they promise in this place. Here and there a flash of a wing cuts through the clouds, but it's gone so fast it could be nothing more than another vulture circling and searching for a corpse. It's clear on the other side of the wall. A image of the wall appears in her head, from the other side and there are no guards watching this corner of the wall near the poorest part of the city.
Isra turns back to the wall that's looming-- until it's not looming at all. Not anymore.
Part of the wall, arched and barely higher than the point of her horn, is no longer stone. On the ground there is now a pile of diamonds, ankle deep. They feel cold and sharp against her fetlocks as she moves through them into the Solterra capital. She hardly makes a sound as she moves towards a flag waving outside what seems to be an empty house. Isra smiles and takes that flag between her teeth. She rips it down.
Once it hits her back it becomes a shroud of silk, burnish gold with obsidian buttons that she latches at her chest. In that shroud of silk she's just another body dressed in the color of sand. The chain around her leg becomes a band of silver strung with amethyst and ruby. There are small suns etched in the metal between the stones. She looks like nothing more than a plain, bay unicorn. There is nothing special about her with her chain gone and her scales covered up. Isra cannot help but think this might be how she would have dressed if it was Eik who brought her here.
It's war that's brought her here though, and she shakes out any thoughts of love and softness. Now is the time to be cold as ice and sharp as a blade. She walks towards the heart of the city and reminds her hooves to move like a slave instead of a queen. It comes easy to her, the low head and downward eyes. Most nights she still dreams of the lash, and brutality. Now she's glad for the nightmares, she'll welcome each shard of steel they drive into her heart.
Each time she stumbles across a family, slat-ribbed and full of hopelessness she pauses. She directs them to the wall, whispering “Go south, follow the wing in the clouds. Take some of the diamonds with you. Buy a new life. Go and go quickly.” Over and over she pauses to send families away. She doesn't tell them to go to Denocte, but she hopes they will.
And each time she walks close to a pillar or a sign about rations and loyalty she pauses to turn the stone below it to a metal flower. Each time she leaves that message for Raum something sparks inside her, something vicious and poison. She wonders how long it will take him to hear of the metal flowers growing in the stone, bright yellow and charred black. Will he see them and think of Acton? Or will he think of her?
The center of the capital is still a way off, but she doesn't let her stride falter or the war waiting, dark and electric in her gaze dim.
open to anyone! | "speaks" | notes: anyone from the raugime is welcome to come harass her, or someone can just chat with her.
