The dragon watches Lysander from his crevice high up in the canyon walls. He looks at each tine of bone crowning the stallion and calls it a weapon. Even through he knows that form walking through the dying light, back in a time were he was smaller (and didn't yet know the taste of violence and worry), he still thinks that maybe he shouldn't tell Isra that another name upon her heart has come to see the rot.
Fable doesn't know if she can bear another crack in a heart made for stories but forged now for war. He stays quiet and only rests his head along the stone, watching like a lion who has decided to let fate choose how the world revolves.
It is the soft song echoing through the canyons that makes Isra tilt her head towards the main pathway like a doe who has just heard a wolf. Each note is no more than a whisper but she still thinks that the bloody stone feels alive with the sound of it. She lays her cheek against the stone and is almost surprised when she doesn't feel a heartbeat begging for freedom against her skin.
When the the shadow of the singing stallion stretches out around a corner and Isra sees those tines reaching out towards her like ivy, she sobs. Her heart rattles in her chest just as the canyon stone trembled like organs before a quiet, soft song. She swallows and reminds herself that she's ice and steel now and no longer a doe in a moonlit garden.
“Lysander.” She calls out and it sounds like another note of that song she's not singing. No matter how hard she swallows down that crack, crack of her softness she cannot make his name sound like winter on her tongue. All the vowels of it taste too much like sunlight and gold. It feels like she has grass and clover stuck between her teeth.
Isra thinks of Eik and she almost wants to join him in singing to the blood-red rock.
But then she looks at the blade swinging at his neck like a gavel. It seems to her that it glints a warning in each shine of dead light on the point of it. Isra tosses her head towards him so that each of their weapons might look at each other and say, if nothing else, we are together in this.
She smiles and she wonders if he knows enough of her to see all the ways that her teeth shine sharp instead of dull. “Have you come to me with a song of war on your lips?” Once she would have laughed at the thought of him laying offerings of violence at her hooves. Once she would have laid offerings of golden petals at his altar.
Once they were only a unicorn and a stag slumbering in the thicket.
Now Isra isn't sure what they are.
@Lysander
