"and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart"
It feels like the northern lights have come for her. The heavens have dropped themselves from the sky, like dead stars chewed out of a black sky. Each touch is a color-- bright red, pale pinks, dusky blues, dirt-brown and soft gray. Thoughts are running like comets through her mind in impossible tangles of iridescent color that taste like salt, sand and love on her tongue.
But the anger and the hunger are the brightest and sweetest on all the heavenly things falling down to hang her heart in a noose. They are blinding, like she's not watching the northern lights anymore. Isra feels like she is speckles of gas held loosely in some shape resembling a unicorn. And she does not need to wonder if he feels all the ways his shoulder and his anger are sinking in, in, into her like he is a stone and she the sea.
Isra has never felt deeper, or blacker. She's brackish against all the light, bright light of him. She drowns that word shouldn't and makes a shipwreck of it. It grows barnacles and corals in the deep black of her; it grows weeds out of salt. “You are wrong.” She hisses back, and it's all that sharp dead salt she's tasting instead of her own voice. All of it is wrong, these pyres of dead trees and charred skin. This anger boiling in each of them like acid looking for virgin skin feels wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet some part of her loves it, loves the way violence anoints the fury filling up her bones where once there was only marrow.
And maybe, maybe she's telling Eik that he is wrong to come for her, to love her. Isra is a monster of vengeance now; she's a weapon. Surely there should be some limit to his love, some part of him that knows that she's not the girl with snow and lust making mountains across her spine-- not anymore.
All she knows is that she belongs here in the sand, and salted sweat, with fire a black char on her tongue. She belongs with the slat-ribbed children where she can turn their dead dandelions into apple seeds and oat seeds.
She should not have to tell him that she belongs wherever he is (her northern lights). She should not have to tell him that he is home. So she doesn't. She thinks it, hot and angry enough to singe.
If Eik told her that it was too dangerous she would only have laughed, and turned each inch of sand around them quicksand and each bit of stone into a blade. She could have drowned the castle and Raum and still had breath left to tell Eik that there is nothing she would not do for him and the court he loves. Doesn't he know already? Doesn't he know she is the most dangerous thing in this court? Raum is only a child playing at violence compared to all the justice growing ivy around her rib-cage.
“I am giving you a home.” She etches the words into his neck with her horn. The hollows of it pull at his mane as if to say..- stop, stop, stop, do anything but try to push me into shadows. Because below her crown of bone her eyes are yelling at him. They are saying she will not go, she will not stop cutting herself open to make a home of herself and all of Novus for him.
Isra does not think she even knows how to stop, not anymore.
In their wake all the dust and ash turns to quicksand with glass flower lily-pads spread across it like a message only the two of them could ever read.
@
