It does not feel as strange as it should to walk across the bridge and find pearl-dust and crushed berries still throbbing out the same furious war-song her heart is singing, and screaming, and sobbing. Each dead thing trembles in the wave of her, tossed side to side on the bridge by the monstrous sea battering at its edges. Isra smiles and all she tastes is brine, and a blood-red berry sweetness.
It does not make her falter like it should. She can still hear the old echo of a Basilisk song and her eyes, like an exploding nebula, are singing a silent song back. All the magic in her blood is pooling like lava. Her skin feels too tight and her bones feel like steel trying to remember how to move with grace instead of fury.
Perhaps if she didn't step off the bridge into a crowd of horses talking about gods and then Raum Isra would have noticed the way the shore was pale as a pearl. She would have noticed how the ocean was the same color as Fable's scales in the noon-time. Maybe she would have looked at the statue then and thought of how all of this would be a wonderful story to tell her children with the northern lights shining protectively over them.
Instead all she can see is that bloody pulp still clinging to her hooves. Lightning flashes in the blackness when she closes her eyes, just long enough to breathe and tell all the furious rage in her blood not yet, not yet. It doesn't work, so she moves though the crowd and there are still ghosts of lightning flashing in her corners of her vision like tiny, caught, fireflies.
Isra doesn't stop until the statue looms above her like a false god atop a mountain that's coming down. She smiles, it's not kind, it's not sweet. It's not the smile of a mother or a queen. It's a weapon of a look that pauses on Asterion, and another queen with gold anointing her skin.
“If there is anything dangerous on this island,” She pauses, inhales just once, and it's like a weight has just been cut loose in the core of her. It's as if she's finally decided what exactly it is she wants to be. “It is not us who should be afraid.” Because she is done with gods, and ghosts, and evil. She is done with tests with no purpose but sorrow.
When she presses her nose against the base of that mountain that's going to come tumbling down the black unicorn statue turns to green-tainted copper --
and then her dragon rises from the sea.
(and a cranky Isra appears)
