Of course she catches the shine of tears in Marisol's eyes before she ducks her face to hide them. How could she not notice them when she's blocking out every hideous inch of suffering sand around them with the planes of Marisol's face? Isra wants to tell her not to hide. She wants to tell her that her tears look like starlight that they could drink of (or drown in).
Isra cannot bring herself to crack open her heart where there is only fire and stone left flowing through each chamber.
Instead she only reaches closer again, already unable to keep that distance between them where war lives and love dies. Around them Solterra is a planet on fire and they are the night overhead, cool dark and alive with constellations. Her lips pull at Marisol's sharp and straight mane and Isra wonders if she too tastes like a sharp thing full of star-water. She wonders what the tears winking up from the bottom of her eyes look like. Do they look like fish in a sea or like ships sailing beneath the waves?
“I would never let anything happen to you.” She says against all that sharp mane stinging her lips like small needles full of the only poison Isra wants to drink. “This rot will begin and end with Raum.” Isra tugs and pulls, anything to lift Marisol's out of the darkness of their shadows. It's enough that she lives in the blackness now and the sun always feels like acid on her skin now. Too long has she been without her cool winter nights and her jasmine spiced fires.
Isra feels like she's just woken up, staring at Marisol and her dark feathers. She's awake and she's dizzy all at once. But it's not the sound of a harp and the feel of silk against her skin that makes her dizzy now. There is so music carrying her feet through the sand as she turns. It's only a war-drum singing in her now, a thrum of fury beaten beneath the dull edge of a blade. She smiles, “And Raum ends with me.”. The flash of her teeth in the place between them is cold, like a candle melting into black water.
There is no one moment in which Isra can remember becoming a warrior. No single beat of her heart that she felt the change come upon her swiftly like a wave upon the shore. She cannot recall when all her bones decided that they wanted to move upon war instead of music. Maybe all that she is now started back with the sea. Maybe she's been bleeding primordial since her first step on sand instead of water.
Isra is grateful for it now, the way she already knows how to die. She is more of a ghost than Raum is.
“Would you like to see how?” All the things flashing in her eyes aren't fish or boats then. Each shine of silver in that deep blue is a shark, a beast of violence rising to the surface because the time has come for feeding.
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