“The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.”
Michael is his own apocalypse and if he dies each morning he is remaking himself each day, hoping to resurrect into something that is not made so ugly by pain or cavernous in the face of this mounting desire to be unmade; he is empty and he is dark, a shack with no electricity, a shack at the bottom of the ocean.
I’m ok, Isra breathes, and Michael almost laughs. “I’m ok” is not one long scream punctuated by wet sobs. “I’m ok” does not smile the way Michael smiles, wolfish and desperate with its tongue pressed tight against the back of its teeth. “I’m ok” is not a large wound trying to cauterize itself on the fires of vengeance.
Sorry, Isra, he knows. Consider the silent gulls, watching them from the cliffsides and the mountainous sea rocks; they mourn. Consider the dandelions bunching still at his ankles; they mourn. Consider her skin that crackles with unspoken spells and the sizzling of magic run wild; it mourns.
Consider the heavy silence that falls between them, Michael’s expression is grim and off in the distance Fable is churning like the ocean churns but twice as loud. He echoes the things that she doesn’t say and if Michael hadn’t known that Isra is an exposed bone, a caustic and ragged and violent ghost sweeping through Novus like a thing possessed, surely he has seen it now.
I am going to kill Raum, Isra says; her voice does not shake. “Then you are going to kill Raum,” Michael answers, “and you are going to free Solterra.”
And she will. Michael is not a creature prone to doubt in the first place but he has seen her peel back reality and remake it without even thinking. If he has been sure of any one thing in his life it is that Isra can bring to ruin any single thing that she wants. Even the ghost that walks through their shadows and haunts the attics of the hearts.
He nods, maybe to reassure himself. The roar of a dragon rings loud in his ears. And, unexpectedly–“Isra, please–”what? He doesn’t know.
(He does know, but it is one of the innumerable things that they do not say, that he does not say in specific, either because they cannot or they do not want to, or both. Please come home. Please stop becoming a weapon and wrecking yourself on the rocks out at sea. Please do literally anything but what you are doing).
@isra
