The devastation spreads around her like a graveyard. Wood rises from the ground like old, charred bones. Ash and snow is falling down around her like the tears of the moon. It coats her spine in white and it gathers along the quiver of arrows hanging at her shoulder. Citizens are already walking among the wreckage, salvaging what food they can for the winter ahead.
Isra should not smile to see the sorrow in their eyes, but she does. Because this-- this she can fix.
Her steps are almost silent through the ash and snow. Isra walks into the center where the fire still smokes and smolders feebly, and she thinks that this is the reason she came home when she did. This is the reason the sea didn't let her die. It's the reason her magic feels like a monster in the weak cage of her bones. The reason she loves a dragon, who is cleaning ash of his wings in the distant lake. She has to believe it's all for some reason, otherwise she would give herself to war and vengeance until there was nothing left of the queen with stories on her tongue and scales kissing her belly.
Katniss joins her right as the magic in her is humming a wild song and begging to be let out. Isra smiles at her Champion although the fire sparking in her ocean eyes is anything but kind or gentle. “Katniss.” Her horn signs in the wind as she turns towards the black mare to see her eagle lying far too still on her back. She makes another tick in all the injustices for which Raum must pay.
There are too many black marks in her anger for her to count them all now.
The smile on her lips turns a little wild, a little terrible, a little like a weapon instead of a feeling. “I'm glad I came home to this, if it was going to happen no matter whether I was here or not.” Her magic lunges out her them and the graveyard of provisions shudders with the force of it.
Every charred apple turns to bright red and healthy. Each torn sack glimmers with golden threads like caught moonlight bloated with all the food it's protection. The broken boards turn to marble, and silver, and maps of gemstones. Around her wealth and food blooms like a garden in early winter. An sleeping oak tree near them turns to an apple tree, a bit of grass struggling to live under the snow turns to stalks of wheat. The snow seems like diamond-dust on which a bed of apples, and fruits, and stalks of wheat lay.
Isra closes her eyes when her lungs start to tremble a little and her heart starts to flutter like a caught hummingbird. The beast of her magic goes back to sleep, as content as a bloated dragon.
And when she opens her eyes again to look at Katniss there is war shining in them, brighter than all the wealth she's created. “I learned a few things while I was gone.” Isra doesn't think she needs to say that she learned how to be a weapon. Or that Raum himself created the blade that will hunt him until the end of time.
She looks at Katniss, with her tired eagle and her scars, and Isra knows that her Champion will understand.
@
