There is both anger and smoke running through her veins. All her blood is thick with it, slow moving, until each moment she walks with rage feels like an hour. It feels almost sentient, as if in this unicorn cage there is Isra, her magic, and this new beast moving slow like a snake through the mud. Once she wanted to divide them or perhaps find a way to make herself be nothing more than Isra the queen with stars in her eyes and a moon in her heart.
Now she welcomes them, and tonight she lets them run wild in her core.
The world trembles around her. It becomes. Wood turns to rock, to new steel too cold to burn, to everything on which a fire cannot feed. Her magic becomes a nightmare for the fires and her heart becomes a terror for each horse that set their evil eyes towards her city. Ahead she can see the boy run for freedom.
Raum's. She would know the shape of him until the day she dies. When she sleeps she can still see his youthful eyes hard with hatred. Some nights she still wakes with the cold sweat of betrayal across her brow instead of a crown. And maybe, she thinks then, a broken heart is the only crown queens wear in the end (broken hearts and the darkness that remakes them).
Isra follows at a distance, although her hooves quicken to the drum of rage beating a tune in her bones. The beasts are running in her, and when she enters the bar the windows turn to steel bars that let only the moonlight and weak fire-glow through. Her eyes not not waiver from the boy resting almost broken against the wood. Isra does not want to smile. “Welcome home.” The words are flat and her heart breaks a little more to say the word home in such a way.
But tonight is not for breaking, her beasts remind her. And so she turns towards Morrighan and the mare she does not know. “Tell me what happened.” No, her beats say, tonight is not for betrayal.
Tonight the moon in her heart shines for vengeance and the stars in her eyes are burning hot enough to become small suns.
