“And white winter, on its knees, observes everything with reverent attention.” ”
Isra is learning how to read that flicker of something greater crawling across a map of bones and skin. There are messages in the fire of all of them, bits of fury and hate, that refuse to be drained dry like a spring pond in summer. It's in her too, that eddy of heat swirling and caught in the corner of her heart. She knows it'll never go away, not when her body remembers feel of teeth at her throat, or the way her magic feels like a whip of salvation when it flays pieces of her off.
So perhaps they walk through the arching doorways not like two mares, but like summer chained.
The rubies follow her, blooming across the ice and snow like not-flowers. They bloom glorious and strange, a little like the ice rising around them in a place where flowers have died to give it life. Isra wonders if she's the winter or the summer; she wonders which parts of her are life and which only death.
And when that window etched with love and constellations stretches alongside them, she does not look. Instead she looks only at the mare and smiles even when she wants to scream, and cry, and turn the temple into wood. Wood can smolder, it can burn just like she's burning with need to turn towards that window.
“I'm Isra.” Her name sounds a like hollow, cracked bell-chime. She's a steeple with no foundation, an altar with no religion, a ship trapped in a sand dune. She is a hundred different things that do not make sense anymore, nothing does. Even her name seems strange on her own tongue when she wants to ask the mare who she is, why her eyes look not like eyes but like an ocean. She wants to fill the silence around them with enough words to drown her need to turn the winter to burning wood.
She doesn't let her step falter when they walk by that window calling to her heart. But the rubies are still blooming at her feet in small reminders that even her magic still doesn't feel like her. So she says, to break the sound of ice turning to bloody stone, “What would you have carved on a window?” Because she knows what her heart and her awful magic would have demanded she carve.
@Antiope
