Her soul is not moving in the same way it once did. It's moving like a snake, like a lion in the tall grass, like a shark beneath the waves. It's moving in a million different ways and each is more different than the last. Isra's soul hurts and aches as it stretches out inside her bones.
Lysander, with his forest eyes and his coat that sun loves so, is making her remember all the ways her soul used to move. She counts the lashes curling lushly back from his eyelids and she wants to forget all the ways the world is lovely and sometimes kind. Because if she cannot forget she will not be able to become the monster. She's afraid that if she doesn't remember how to be hard and winter cold that she want will want to turn away and forget all about killing.
Magic moves with her when she pulls her body and her soul back from the shelter of him. She lets her magic make something wicked of her smile, something sharp enough to cut. It feels like the smile on her lips is making her bleed in all the places the world cannot see. “Let them find us then.” Her voice is weaker than the dangerous thing between her lips.
A ray of sun catches on her horn, it gleams gold even when Isra thinks her horn should only gleam ruby red now. Rocks tug at her tail when she presses against the wall. Her smile flickers, and fades, and winks out like a dead star. “You're wrong to think it's not terrible.” She corrects him but there is no pride in her voice, only sorrow and a hollow acceptance of all the ways in which she is becoming as terrible as any god.
Isra blinks because her soul moves wrong, wrong, wrong, when she looks at the sun shining bright on his tines.
She opens her eyes and tries to bury her soul.
The wall at her back to turns to a wall of swords. Some are sharp and thin, or long and chipped. Others are curved like wheat-scythes made of ruby instead of steel. There is a dagger of diamond shining beside an hammer made of quartz. Everything on that wall is made to be as beautiful as it horrible and dangerous. Isra does not smile when she turns to look at it. Fable does not roar righteously when the watches the world turn around his distant unicorn. Together they are only accepting of the ways in which violence has made them become as fiery and full of purpose as any phoenix.
“What will you do if it takes more than one man's death?” She does not turn back to look at Lysander. Her gaze is still hanging on the terrible thing her magic has made. And if there is a pearl of saltwater growing fat in the corner of one eye she does not want him to see. “What if it takes a hundred deaths? Would you call it a war then?” Even as she asks it, she knows the answer. A blade trembles and falls from the wall to the sand caught in her shadow. It falls as if the desert has rejected her magic, or as if a god has given her the blessing to becoming something awful and monstrous.
Isra does not pick up the blade, but her soul wants her too.
@Lysander
