Isra is not thinking of endings. Nor is she thinking thoughts of salvation as she looks out towards that wall of black soot and banked walls of sea. Rather she is thinking about a hundred stories. Each is dripping lines of script in black ink across her thoughts. She's thinking about it like holy scripture--all that wonder, all those heroes, all those deaths.
She is thinking of each blot of ink sinking into her blood like poison. She is thinking that her magic is eating up each drop it it, each line of holy, legendary writ like a lion eating a banquet of lambs.
Isra is thinking about becoming. It makes her smile wild, and more than a little dangerous. There are sparks in her eyes, lighting bolts streaking down across a meadow of glass feathers and torn up trees. And it's in that moment that she becomes a war, and she knows that it's going to end in death. When she swallows it's acceptance on her tongue, not brine, or salt, or bitter tears.
There is only one way to rid this world of monsters.
Fable swoops upward and his wings are cutting through ribbons of ash like blades through silk. The darkness glints across his shining belly like night streaking upward across the twilight horizon. He does not think to dive back into the sea, even with the soot starts to dry out his salt-water hide and burn in his eyes. He doesn't know if he'll stop until that mountain in the distance dies.
Even a dragon knows that all of this ends in death. Although he hope it's not his unicorn's (or his, he thinks he is too young to burn up and dissolve into the thick skies). But as long as Isra is still below him with a war in her heart and a determined beat rattling against her rib-cage he will fly, and fly, and fly-- to the end of the world if she asked it of him.
Isra does not look away from that black looming beast when she says, “If it doesn't turn maybe I will finally find out how deep my magic runs.” Because she hasn't found the bottom of it, not since Raum woke her up in a cave with Acton's name written across her skin in swirls of dried blood.
Her magic eats a another story and another hero. It starts looking for another one (another lamb). Isra tries not to think about the way it feels against her shattered heart.
She doesn't do anything but wonder how quickly Fable can carry her to that island exploding in the sea.
@Asterion
