Isra does not know what she expected to hear the moment his song gave way to word. All she knows is that she did not think to want the shape of a ending falling from his soot-stained lips. Stories seem like beasts for the thicket and the mountains. They do not belong trapped between walls of bedrock and shadows that stretch like mighty beasts around them. But here Lysander is, with a story she never wanted to end on his tongue and endless space between them.
For the first time she starts to think of all the things war is not, instead of all the things war is. She thought of it as a beginning to the rest of her life (with Eik, with Moira, with Marisol, with Denocte). And if she thought about it as the end of Raum, she only told herself it was the beginning of peace.
Now she knows, looking at him, that war is an end. The end of stories because they've all been drowned in ink thicker and wetter than blood. She thinks it's the end of magic as something beautiful inside her, instead of something dangerous and deadly. Isra thinks of war as the end of this, of her, of hope, of dreams full of things that should-not-be.
She still has a smile on her lips when she tilts her head towards him like a sparrow at a fox low beneath a tree. Inside she wants to look away, towards anything but the ending that is already between them. But there is no getting past that last page hanging between them like a shadow thick enough to choke her. “Of course she did.” She says and she wonders if she is as beautiful as she is terrible.
Bits of stone around her turn to emeralds shaped like ivy. Amethyst petals replace dust and they form themselves into cold, hard blooms of nightshade. The world around her grows lovely and horrible. Each stone glints along her skin like a weapon, blade of light waiting for the cut.
“Sing me a song then.” Isra stays where is is, leaning against her garden of stone and death. The distance still looms between them, like war she did not want but one she will take anyway. “Sing me a song by which a girl with terrible magic might go to war.”
Because Isra, and her magic that kills everything she makes beautiful, is going to war. And when she's done there will not be a body left by which a ghost might bleed.
@Lysander
