Love. Isra has never defined herself by the word; she has never thought to. Nor has she ever thought to define herself in the shape of a stallion's eye. But now when Eik looks at her with all the weight of a universe Isra thinks that she has never known how to shape herself.
But now she knows. She knows it the moment the fires lick church pillars across the plane of her ribs. She knows the moment in which she has become all the things that a primordial beast made her to be. Eik's eyes hold everything that she is, everything that she ever wants to be-- love and sorrow, war and a vicious sort of hope. How did she ever think that the creature between them could not unleash her?
She is unleashed the moment she tastes the salt and blood on his skin (her blood, of course it's her blood). If it was his she would have torn the mountain down and let all the god churches burn down to nothing. There is no world Isra will not destroy for his life, no weapon she will not wield.
Maybe that is all love is. Love is madness and Isra is mad, mad, mad for her city and this scar coated man.
Fable turns away towards the wood and soon the trees swallow him whole. This is not a moment for him. He knows that in his bones. Just like the sea knows that it will never under understand each thing hidden beneath desert sands, Fable knows he could never understand this madness between lovers (and he is hungry anyway).
Isra tries to smile but her lips cannot bring themselves to part from his skin. They are tracing each scar, laying kisses across suffering as if she can draw each from his skin. She wants her touch to be the antidote to every ounce of pain and every dark deed that still lays coiled in each of them like a sea of waiting snakes. So instead of smiling she whispers to the curl of his ribs and wonders if her voice sounds like a roaring fire or a cool rain. “I could make it to the end of the world if you asked it of me.” For him she would do anything, even if her body told her no
Her magic trembles dead in her bones. Isra doubts it could make water anyway because even dead it still hums to her of violence and war. It sings like a monster and she cannot help but think again of madness and love.
There is water just a little ways ahead. Fable interrupts her dark thoughts like he always does. This time a smile finally manages to curl her lips when she stops singing to Eik's heart with words of fire and rain. “But the stream sounds much easier than the end of the world.” And because she's this new creature defined by love and magic, she moves into the shadows to lead the way.
Like a siren of the sea, she knows he will follow.
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