“Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.”
This time she is nothing more than a shadow lingering in all the bright sunlit sand of Solterra. There is black around her from the stone monoliths that tower above her, beasts made of desert and blood. Today her head is covered in a black shroud like a death priest would wear (or maybe a shed-star). Even her horn is nothing more than a spiral of ore sprouting from a brow that never anointed itself in a golden crown.
Isra is a cobweb in the dark, a tangle of silken and fragile threads. She's thin enough to sway in a breeze like a song. Most of all she's a trap and it's only in the right light, when she's draped in a necklace of dew, that the hunger in her smile is visible at all. And oh how sweetly she is smiling at the enforcers walking the empty streets (like a spider instead of a unicorn).
But then, oh then, a flurry of feathers breaks up the acid roar of fury in her belly. Her gaze snags on white down softness and skin the color of rotten wood (more dark than brown). All her hunger rises to a fever pitch and starts to feel something like fear instead of rage. Every molecule of air catches in her lungs like they are made of concrete instead of organ. Even her heart stutters in her ribs like a clock that's missing a gear.
All of Isra sobs out to see Marisol here among the red-stone and silence. She still hasn't found Eik in this sea of sorrow and suffering. Isra is willing to drown in it, this sea of black, but she's not willing to see all the veins running through her heart drown too.
She would burn this whole city to the ground first, flood it in salt-water and pearls.
“Marisol.” The black spiderweb says and all her fragile threads flutter in the breeze of the name on her lips. It's a prayer wind, that sigh of a name, and her teeth ache with the sweetness of it under all the dust and grime coating them. “You shouldn't be here.” One of her threads snaps in the breeze, and her fury is cracking beneath the weight of all this caring and fear. She's adrift in the shadows when she steps away from them.
Isra wonders if she looks like a ghost now too, a shadow set loose on Novus with hate in her heart.
Her words linger in her air like a blade deciding which spine to swing for. She wants to chase Marisol off with all the reasons she should be anywhere else but near here. But when she buries her nose against that pool of feathers her thoughts tumble over each other. The feathers tickle at her nose like pollen and petals all Isra can think is this---
“But I'm glad you are.” For just a moment Isra rejoices in the feel of feathers and the way the hunger and hate in her heart ebbs at the wind-smell hiding in Marisol's wings. And just like that, she's forgotten how to be a shadow in which a spider waits for the feast.
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