Isra watches him with snow and dead grasses dancing around her hooves like pale ghosts of things that have forgotten how to live. Each changes to something else the moment it touches her skin, but everything she creates is still dead, dead, dead. All her magic kisses bring with them only a dead beauty glimmering in the gloaming winter-light.
Every inch of her trembles to join him. Every inch of her tongue is full of words and her teeth are throbbing behind her black lips. She wants to tell him that she's sorry, that she understands, that she's happy. She wants to tell him that she's happy to dash herself against the shoreline of war and turn each of her bones to weapons.
Isra is happy that war has called her, that she might battle onward towards death so that all the ones she loves might stay bright like sea-grass in the summer.
She wants to tell him that she misses him. She wants to tell him she's coming home.
But it's only silence that flows like dead music from her when she walks through the snow and mud towards Michael. Her magic is the first to reach him, turning all the wet mud around his ankles to dandelion seeds. The waves wash away the wishes with each pull of the tide. Isra makes more and more of them hoping that he will send at least one wish out to the sea where Fable is waiting to find it.
Isra touches his shoulder with her nose, and her teeth are still throbbing against the force of all the words banging against them. A few escape in the cracks between her teeth and she smiles against his skin.
“Fable misses you.” Her smile feels as brittle as her words, brittle and full of half-truths she's not brave enough to say.
With his mouth full of dandelion seeds Fable rises from the white surf of a far-off wave. His throat hums and vibrates. Wordlessly he gives life to all the broken things rattling around inside of his unicorn.
ISRA MADE OF SHARP PARTS ;
“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
