Even though there is mostly fury unspooling in her chest, when her citizens start to join her pride starts to chill the edges of all her flicking fire. Each time they look at her it feels like winter is falling across her spine instead of ash. But they bring with them fear too. Their faces are quickly becoming smeared with soot that looks to her, in the moonlight, like thick blood beneath a flash of lightning.
The marble spreading out from her turn turns black and shining as her magic is laced with a poisonous worry. It rises like ivy across the walls of every building in the vicinity. The fire looks brighter against all that black but when bits of it start to turn to pearls, it trembles. It looks like the night has fallen across the mortal coil, black as ore and endless as space.
Isra turns more and more marble to pearls and they clatter to the hard stone like hail. Lines of pearls are running through the black stone. The remaining marble trembles and starts to collapse upon itself. The earth groans and the fire hisses. Yet all Isra can hear is each heavy exhale of air through her city's lungs, and the frantic voices of each brave soul who has faced danger.
She does not think of all the food lost. She cannot suffer that yet.
Tears start to shine in the corners of her eyes and she wonders if she could cry enough of them to drown each fire in Denocte. She wonders if she could cry enough tears to drown Raum in suffering, until he is bloated with sorrow. Soon there will be tracks of it running down her face, through the soot, like a map to the place where the world will be right again.
A small mare runs by her with a bucket. There is winter blowing from the lips of a small dragon. Moira has already run by with a tiger, tracking whatever monster they might be able to find. A stallion as bright as a flame is fighting back the fire with a canvas. Isra looks at each of them and the winter gathering in inches along her spine cools the last of her fire.
All she feels now is determination. It's easier, she thinks, than that coil of hate that wants to track down the monster who dared to attack her home. Hope feels cooler than the need to gut each monster left in the world. So it's to hope she turns to when she moves towards the unicorn, and the stallion, and the shadow left by Moira.
“I think the rest of the fire will burn itself out beneath a coffin of stone.” A glint in her eyes promises that there are many other things in this world she will bury in stone and stuff with pearls. It look like the sea is waiting and gathering in a cage made of unicorn skin. “But we should wait to make sure and look for stray embers that might catch.”
Isra swallows beneath that map of sorrow running down her face. “I'm sorry I was gone for so long. But I promise you all that whoever did this will be brought to justice.” The sea gathering in her eyes crashes against its cage of bone. Over and over Raum has brought war to her. Now he has brought it to her city and she has never been so sure that she will be the one to drown him.
Isra was forged a weapon by him and now--
Now she is unleashed.
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