"I discovered metal inside me
where my heart should be.”
where my heart should be.”
Another part of her heart breaks.
“What solution would you find on the shore?” Because how could she not wonder? Isra wants to find a solution too-- to war, to the way her heart aches, to all the hollow places of her that nothing seems to fill anymore. And even though she moves closer Isra doesn't offer to help. There is nothing on the beach she's looking for, that steady war-drum beat of her heart has already told her so.
Yet when she watches Boudika join them, she can't help but think that the mare, with grace in her steps and a banked fire across her skin, might know a little bit about the ache and the hollowness. Isra smiles but it's full of ashen memories and a promise that she won't turn the island into a cage. If there are monsters here, Isra has told herself that she will be the only one of her city hunt them. She'll leave the wonder and the magic for them, but none of the danger.
More of the shore turns to ore. She does not look at it, she promises herself she will not look at all the black blooming out in shining, pitted rings around her. The bits of her heart could not stand it. But she hopes Raum will find this shore, and that he will know each dark-as-night ring is a noose she plans to string around his neck.
Her smile falters as briefly as the flicker of a star before it shines moon-bright against her black skin again. She swallows more of that metallic, jaded bitterness.
When the younger mare corrects Boudika something in her, something full of all the blackness of the night sky in the places between the nebulae and the constellations, rises up a little like a tide. It eddies against her skin until she itches with it. Her horn aches. “I could call a lot of things mine,” She thinks of her dragon, of her Eik, of her city shining on a hill above the sea. She thinks of a thousand things etched across her heart, and that word mine, mine, mine twining between each of them like barbed wire. “but it doesn't make me a slaver. It means I would die for it.” And she can taste it on the wind-- death.
Fable rises from the sea and starts across the shore towards them. His eyes are full of searching things too, and nothing of that answer she still knows she's looking for. Below that, in the places where their souls are melded like iron and gold, is a promise that it's not their death blowing on the wind thinner than ghostly smoke.
She pauses after she looks at him and reminds herself that all of the world is not rotten, only some of it. Only some.
“I am Isra. It is a pleasure to meet you Maerys.” Even though all of her is aching and itching she means it. It's in her eyes that are still dancing with a dull echo of the sound the small dragon sang from above them.
@Maerys @Boudika // <3
