It's the moment that he touches her, as if she is a wild-thing or perhaps a real unicorn, that she knows their cities will be safe. Asterion's touch is a hook and he's catching each bit of her, that holds in it the sea, through the gills. The magic under her skin hums and surges. It boils and rages every bit as fiercely as that distant disaster. Her skin is too tight. Each of her bones are starting to feel like tools of resurrection instead of joints and cages.
Isra feels alive and furious.
Fable wonders if they could sink into the center of the volcano and grow flowers instead of death. Could his unicorn make gold instead of magma?
Isra feels like she could remake the world.
She brushes her nose against his shoulder and inhales salt and sand instead of stardust. There are no stars on her lips, but she still looks him in the eye and her voice becomes the whisper of a new blade. “And I have always dreamed of being brave besides the stars.” Each of her eyes reflects the wall of seawater around them back at him. Something in her chest crashes through her veins like the sea against rocks that are refusing to move.
When she looks back at the exploding wall of soot above the waves her heart sings for destruction. But her stories never told her how to kill a volcano, only how to forge weapons out of silk and make grave-dirt out of evil. She does not know how to fight the earth. But she turns a sea-slug drying out in the sand into a butterfly and wonders if she can turn horses to thunderbirds.
“Do you think the wind will turn?” Isra says and she does not sound as afraid as she should be. Once she would have cried, now she only thinks of all the ways in which she has become a weapon.
@Asterion
