“like a wildfire, crazy like the moon, always like tomorrow, sudden like an inhale and overcoming like the tides”
For the first time she walks through the forest like a real unicorn. All the trees hang over her head in crowns of dying leaves and brittle bark. Lizards follow the black trail her horn makes when the sun pierces itself on all those wicked curves. And the earth turns to gilded gold and stardust silver where her hooves walk. Isra is bleeding magic instead of blood, wonder instead of violence, love instead of rage.
Her heart has grown legs and it's galloping through her chest. Stride after stride it does not falter across the tree-trunks of her rib bones. Step after step the only song it's singing is Eik, Eik, Eik . His name echoes like the only war-trumpet she wants to hear. Even when she steps into the cool water her heart never stops running, and singing, and trumpeting.
She looks at him, dappled by the light with water running around him, and thinks of god. How could she have ever loved the sea in a world in which there was Eik? How could she have ever wanted only to die and shed her mortality like a bad-dream?
This is how villains are made. From girls who look at boys like they're god. Isra is casting all her hope, all her love, all the things that are stopping her from turning east and bringing Raum and everyone around him to their knees, on this scarred man before her. Because she could, she knows she could. She could be awful and terrible if there was not a song her heart would rather sing than war.
Eik's blood would not turn into flowers, bright and yellow.
Isra does not notice the way the water is turning black and pale-red around her body. All she can feel is the coolness of it and the way the current feels a little wild as it licks across her belly. Her heart is still running on four legs and leaving a wake of fire through all her insides. The splash does nothing to settle the wild ache in her, nothing to bank all the ways her magic wants out. But she smiles, bravely, as if every inch of her is not crying and screaming and promising to do terrible things for love.
“We both are.” She says. The current takes that 'we' and carries it downstream where the sea waits open and endless. She wants to go with it, out to sea, and further than that. She wants him to come, to a place where all the things in them can get out and they can be free
But Isra knows (she knows in a hundred ways) that the moment his heart calls to her come that there is no time for them to be free. There is only time to be together, always, and for her to learn all the ways in which villains become. Because she's looking at him and there is no game, of gods or of men, in which she will lose.
She would kill them all if it means that she can move through the water towards him, as she's doing now. Isra would make gods kneel if it meant that she could drag her lips down his face like a blade for the rest of her life, like she's doing the moment she's close enough to touch him. There is no ghost she would not eviscerate, if doing so would allow her to look Eik and in the eye and open up her running soul to him.
Because that's what's she's doing now, looking at her love and asking him to run, run, run wild and feral with her. “I love you.” Isra looks him in the eye and begs him to demand anything, and everything, of her.
And still her heart is running, running, running. She doesn't think it will ever be still in her bones again.
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