Isra and the black, metal teeth
“I am freedom and I will eat your heart.”
“I am freedom and I will eat your heart.”
F
able is the first to spot him walking behind her not like a shadow but like an oil-slick. Against the red-stone and dust, when Fable looks down the stallion looks not black. The dragon thinks he looks like a crow, full on sad rodents and slick sided with a strange sheen that teases Fable's gaze through the cloud-cover. Careful. He warns his unicorn and he sends an image of the oil-slick reaching out towards the sea of her. There's worry running electric down that spiral of love between them, worry and anger tainted with hunger. Fable wants but he's still not sure what it is that's driving the salt-water boil of ocean in his belly. Isra can feel that hunger too and sometimes she thinks it only belong to her. That this dragon of need is flying in the space between her ribs with wings tipped in talons and poisons. Sometimes she thinks that between her and Fable she's the real dragon who belongs in the bottom of the sea.
It seems silly now to have been so sure she drowned and came back as a still-slave in a unicorn skin. When she pauses and turns to look back at that speaking, towering pool of oil behind her the thing that blossoms below her magic feels primordial. It feels like the sea is inside of her, a world of rip-tides and ships dashed upon the bones of her.
She smiles.
His horns are the first thing to catch her gaze. How could they not? That primordial current slamming against her bones wants to know what else but gold has touched those curling, perfect horns. Have they tasted of magic? Of flesh? Of salt-water? Of blood?
Isra looks for his gaze and finds only blackness and oil. The blackness reminds her of crows and a dark cave full of knives and flowers, of ghosts, of all the things she has promised herself to devour. Her own single horn sighs in the dry wind and when the cloud-cover shifts the shadow of it waivers across the ground, like a white-tipped wave crashing against the sand. It is not tipped in gold, but the hollow curls of it look almost wanting in the dappled light shifting through the clouds.
“Do you like my flowers?” Her voice is nothing more than a whisper in the noise of the crowd around them. Isra does not miss the way the poor and the weak curl around his massive form, like he's a void that might swallow them whole if they get to close. It should make her pause, but it doesn't. Oh it doesn't! Instead she only leans into that space between them like a gavel leaning over stone and ready to swing. She hangs there and the world almost seems to pause on that inhale of desert air in her lungs.
Everything in her cries out for the spice and soot of her home's mountain breeze.
Isra swallows down the dust and the heat. She chews on the sorrow in the wind like it's ash. It coats her teeth with the grime of it. She exhales--
A circle of flowers spreads out around her where only dirt and stone was before. The jagged petals look like the black teeth of the earth reaching out from the belly of the world. They do not look like they would bend easy. They look hungry, like it's not flies that they want.
The unicorn dressed in gold does not shift her eyes from him. They shine bright like the summer sea and the current running through them whispers words that her grime covered teeth do not want to surrender.
Would you like to see how many your mouth can hold? Her eyes say.
You can have them all. She does not blink.
@El Rey | "speaks" | notes: <3
