“Shall we mourn here deedless forever a shadow-folk mist-haunting dropping vain tears in the thankless sea”
At first Isra came to the lake only to lay beneath the willow tree, bury herself in snow, and listen to the glass leaves sing a sad song against each other. She wanted to dream of Eik who tucked clovers and sweet grass between her lips. Any dream full of rolling meadows instead of fire or waving flowers in the wind instead of waving swords in the sand. Isra is desperate for anything that feels like love instead of hate, peace instead of war.
Sometimes she feels like she's dying in her own skin.
The distant sea is still calling her home in that place between the dream and the real. Each day it's leaking out a little more.
So she came to bury herself in winter instead of fury. But instead she found a castle by the lake, shining with more colors than she could ever name. It looks like something too wonderful to touch (she thinks she breaks everything lovely she ever touches). Isra almost trembles when she gets closer, and when that old artist looks at her she feel like a lie of a queen. She's about to turn away. But--
She spots the widow on which a mare and a stallion lay tangled beneath a shroud of stars. Air catches in her lungs and her heart quivers like an arrow in her chest. She feels hollow and wanting, and, and, and...
And she feels like she wants to learn how to bury herself in whatever ice that window is cut from. Isra wants more than anything to lay her cheek against that plane of winter and scream Eik in her head until he can hear nothing in the world but her calling him home. She wants every mind in the world to echo with the sound of her sorrow, until he has no choice but to listen. It terrifies her to think that she wants justice with the seem fervor as she wants Eik.
A mare crosses before her, and Isra cannot help but look at all the elegant curl of her neck and think, this is how I should learn to move, always. She calls out and it's soft like the lowing of a swan at the crescent moon. “Are you going in?” Her hooves whisper through the snow and leave small moons full of rubies in each place she steps. The stones glitter like blood, like she's bleeding out a hundred small pieces of something hard and sharp.
“If you are, would you mind if I walked with you?” Because she's so very terrified of what she might do if she makes it alone to that window singing to her of winter, and Eik, Eik, Eik.
@Antiope
