She remembers reading stories about how souls 'become'. Her tongue has known the way 'rise' and 'change' taste sharp and sweet. Metamorphosis. She knows the word, but she's never considered how it feels to break down and reform between a cage of skin.
But she knows now.
The building where Fable left her groans beneath the lash of her magic. The wall becomes steep stairs and she barely lets her magic finish before she's running down the stone staircase. Each stair looks slick with blood and red-light as the fire roars like a lion before her. Isra drapes that sound across her heart and embeds her soul in soot. Each organ waits there, like caterpillars beneath cocoons. Her rage grows, and grows, and grows. It grows wings.
Soon it's embers and ash meeting her hooves as she rushes to the fire. She feels both hot and cold, like she's the sun and the night is winter kissing along her spine. Everything is black around the fire. It's sucked up each inch of light in Denocte, as if it's set to call the moon to battle. Firelight turns her horn to a lit blade upon her brow. It's hard to image that she has ever been anything like the sea. Tonight her eyes blaze like that fire. She blazes like wildfire and she's ready to consume the world.
Isra already knows Raum is behind this. It drives another nail into his coffin and presses another stone down on him. She'll let the world swallow him whole in the end. She will swallow him whole.
Her magic is humming like hornets in her bones and the noise it makes as it gathers sounds like another roaring inferno. She thinks the moon is forcing itself out of her skin, cold and silver, a stone in a black lake. Magic sings like a coyote at that moon when it lunges out of her skin towards that spire of flames reaching out for all the gods who has forsaken each of them. Every inch of wood around her turns to marble laced with mica. Each inch of cloth turns to ore, heavy and weighed. Isra's magic consumes everything the fire can eat.
She will starve the fire and make a specter out of it.
Tonight a ghost of hate will die.
Around her horses are staring, both at the fire and at their lost queen returned. Something in Isra breaks a little more to have no smiles for them. Only the inferno of rage breaking free to fly greets them when she turns her eyes towards the crowd. “We need water from the wells. I can only starve it slowly.” Horse start to run, shaken loose from their thoughts by the hollow ring of her voice. How different, they must think, from their story-telling queen with stars in her eyes. Each inch of her is stone now, dull and gray moon-stone.
Isra walks closer to the fire and her skin heats like a wax ready to melt. She wonders what will break through when this shell is done burning.
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