"Hearts rebuilt from hope
resurrect dreams killed by hate."
resurrect dreams killed by hate."
She wonders what imprints she leaves behind? Is it softness or war now? It is a dreamy story or the song of a drum beaten by bones? Once she wanted to know which. Now she's not so sure. Maybe it's better not to know that one has become a monster.
So all she does is look at the mare who leaves imprints at the back of her eyes and says honestly, “magic or no magic I'm glad you were brought here.” Because she wished that just once, when she was dying on the streets and hiding in the cobwebs, that someone would have looked at her and said they were glad she was home. Then, maybe then, she wouldn't have lost herself in the mountains with the flocks of animals destined to die.
Maybe she would have been more than an accidental queen then surrounded by candidates far better suited then her.
Now she's a queen with a story on her tongue, and hope a dying song her heart is forgetting how to sing. Tonight it's the fires teaching her again-- the fires and her city that sings and dances even with war knock, knock, knocking at their torn down gates.
Isra smiles at Morrighan when she asks of her magic, and it's not as gentle as it was before. That imprint is still stinging when she closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them there is something almost wicked (as all true joy is a little wicked and feral). “No.” She answers. Her teeth shine against her black face more red than white when she steps towards the fires. The fires make a strange thing out of her-- not queen, not unicorn, but something else, something that loves a dragon.
Fable flies over head and the shadow he leaves behind seems blacker than the places the firelight does not go.
“It is more than that.” A building at her back turns to marble. A bit of stone turns to glass as black as the sky. A piece of wood in the fire turns to gold that runs molten like blood below the fire. A twist of wire curls up a totem where ribbon once was. The world around her quivers with the suggestion that it's all just a dream (that nothing but Isra is real in the sea of it).
She smirks back even though the gesture seems wrong on her face. But her eyes are still shining like the sea, happy just to wash against the shoreline of her pupils. Her eyes are not smirking, but whispering that they are glad, so glad, that the warrior mare is there to talk to her of things that make her mind sting. “I'm sure someday your magic will remember how to burn the world down. But until then, I will be happy to turn the ground to dead wood for you to practice with.”
Isra starts away, back towards the blackness where her dragon's shadow has long since faded. Fable is a low hum in her head, whispering to her that the snow is coming and that another part of her city has a fire that is cooling. She calls over her shoulder, “Find me when you're ready to practice”. And then her hooves kick up into a canter.
The darkness of Denocte swallows its queen like she's a lantern instead of a unicorn.
@morrighan // <3 thank you for a perfect prompt thread
