“She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.”
F
able is eager to turn his wings towards home even though there is a sliver of worry digging at him like a shovel. It feels sharp in his heart. He thinks of the way his shell felt when it was cracking, like porcelain at his lips, sharp and brittle. He wants to get to the bottom of whatever hole it that shovel of worry is digging in his heart.The dragon, still young despite his size, hopes that the bottom of that worry will fill him the way the first sight of his unicorn did. Will there be stories at the bottom of this war? Or will there be only death like the blackness at the bottom of the sea?
All he does know, when he lands in the gardens in front of his castle, is that nothing feels the same anymore. Nothing feels really happy, each moment feels stolen (like a dream he never wants to wake from). Even the night feels colder around him with more than just winter, it feels darker too.
He does not think it is only the absence of his unicorn that has made this place feel so heavy on his wings.
His bugle rings, quite and haunting. Fable tries to sound like a harp Isra once played for him when she told him a story of a ship sailing the sea and a captain looking for a way to heal his broken heart. It was so long ago (or at least it seems that way to him) that he's forgotten how it ended. He tells himself he'll ask her again, when he can return back to his unicorn.
When Moria finally comes to him, he stops his humming. On his neck there glints in the moonlit a scroll of silver paper. It shines like a small star against his dark scales. Fable drops his head into the flowers. The scroll falls loose from the kelp twisting around his neck.
The paper sighs against the flowers and whispers secrets in the early-winter wind. Everything about it seems to pray for a touch or a teardrop in the places where sand lies on the paper like a sheen of smoke. Fable knows how many tears went into the words, how each tear was made into a drop of bright dark ink (dark as dried blood in the sunlight). But he doesn't know how to say any of the words to Moria, and so he only breathes on the paper until it lands like a too-large firefly at her hooves.
It unfurls and the sound it makes on the petals sounds like, read me.. Or maybe he's only hearing it as a dragon would. Maybe it really says, I'm sorry.
The ink shines in the moonlight like oil, slick as the sorrow of the unicorn who bedded down under a high-noon sun to write it.
Moria,
There are a million words I thought of writing. There are a hundred moments that I thought of you and our city. But I don't know how to form any of those feelings into words and ink. It feels like a cruel trick of my heart, that I can shape the world into the strange and wonderful but I cannot make words form themselves on paper with any sort of meaning at all.
But for you I will try. I would do anything for you and our city.
Here the paper runs onward, moon-bright and shining. There are dots of ink on that empty space. Maybe there are shapes waiting to be seen in those puddles of ink. The unicorn who wrote it was too busy thinking of words and war. It was her broken heart that splattered the ink like tears.
I am not coming home.
Not yet..
The paper runs on blankly again. This time there are no ink tears in that stretch of shining silver.
I can't come home when there is still a monster that was created in our streets running lose in the world. Raum has taken Solterra hostage and the desert is alive with more suffering than there is sand in the dunes. The citizens are hungry and living in fear, I cannot leave them to that fate.
Moria, I am going to war.
I must.
There have been moments in which I knew I could kill him. Moments in which I didn't want to become a monster and so I swallowed my hate and stilled that final killing blow. I cannot make the same mistake again, not when so many are suffering for my softness.
The ink gathers closer together here, as if the world around the writer has quickened and tried to take her away. It looks like words running together, like fear runs on in the darkness. There is no pace to it but fear and heartbreak and each curl whispers a pattern of worry.
If one of us had to become war for this world I am glad that it was me. I am glad that the city still has you to watch it with love in your heart instead of hate.
And so now I find that I am gladly turning in my stories for blades and my love for rage. You are the only relief I have now-- you and the thought that Denocte will be safe even if I must become a beast to save it.
Love our court well. And know that I will love you more than that.
Do not pray for me. Pray for all the people who are suffering for my weakness.
The signature at the bottom is nothing more than a slash of ink. It looks like a blade that spells out the name--
Isra
And when Moira finally looks away from the letter she might see drops of saltwater gathering in Fable's eyes below the low burn of violence churning like a sea-storm.
@Moira | "speaks" | notes: I'm not crying at all
