“Not so sad and tender, like I’ve always been, they say, so I changed. ”
Isra knows that she should look inward, towards the beast in her belly that's rattling like chain around her leg. There's ice all around her, but there is only winter in her chest where wonder should be. All her blood feels like festering wine, too sweet and ruined to do her any good now.
And maybe, she's feeling like the sea is crashing against the shoreline of her bones. Maybe she wants to drown so that she won't look at the window and her city shining with light and fire. Because each time she looks all Isra can think of is all the ways she's still going to bleed, and bleed, and bleed for all of them.
So instead she looks at Antiope and tries to forget the sea, and the windows, and the way her blood hurts each time her heart beats. Isra tries to smile when the rubies stop blooming strangely at her feet. She tries to look like anything but a unicorn with teeth-mark scars across her neck instead of pearls. It's a queen she's trying to seem like when Antiope says, death.
Then--
She smiles. It doesn't look as forced as her queenly walk and her blood starts to run smoother, like steel through skin. Isra feels easy in her own skin. She feels like the sea feels against the horizon (easy and endless). “Necessary.” She repeats and it doesn't sound like the question it should be; it sounds like a prayer to a god she's just learning about. “I never thought about death like that before.” She doesn't say that it helps or that she understands it's as necessary as a leech is to a riverbed. But she wonders if her eyes, that are shining too brightly against ice and rainbow walls, give away all the words she's not saying.
“I will carve it with you.” Not would, tonight the word would is as dead as her innocence. Tonight there is only doing, only death.
Isra lays her cheek against the ice. She sighs for the coolness of it against heat of that fire smoldering in her bones. The ice turns to cedar-wood. It's red, red, red against all the white and clear ice around it. She turns a lantern hanging near them into a blade with an ivory hilt. It glimmers wicked and sharp in the dancing, colored light around them.
And when she uses her telekinesis to hand it to Antiope, her smile fades into something as deep as a pledge. Above that her eyes are whispering I understand and we are death. Another lantern turns to a blade but this one has below it a hilt of ore, pitted and black.
@Antiope
