"also troubled -
roses in the wind,”
roses in the wind,”
Jasmine is blooming around her, tangled around a trellis make of oak and antler. Each time she inhales the sharp sweetness of it she can't help but remember the taste of bloom and poison on her tongue. Isra quivers and it has nothing to do with the cool spring night. And when she closes her eyes she can see flashes of blades, and drops of blood, and teeth running across that blackness in great streaks of blindingly white monsters.
Another inhale, and this time it's wisteria on her tongue. When she opens her eyes it's to look at all the purple vines blooming upward towards the moonlight. She smiles, moves closer, and when she lays her nose against the thicket of flowers, some of them turn to silver with pearl-dust pollen. There is one that turns bright yellow, dotted with rusted, black metal (but she doesn't look at that one, she can't). The wound will always be too fresh, too new, too eager to make her back into a beast of war.
She starts to move through the garden, leaving wealth in her wake. A small evergreen tree turns into an apple tree, a willow by a fountain turns into a pear tree. The stone pathway turns to marble, bright white with knots of mica. The glitter of it arches out from her shadow, like rings of age deep within the trunk of an old, battered and ancient tree. If her chain is singing, and tolling out the sound of slavery, she does not notice it.
Isra only notices the way that she stands in the garden thick with silence, alone.
A sound, a soft whisper of a memory, draws her attention back towards the gate. She smiles at the darkness there, the way even his wings are a suggestion of something that could be either dangerous or soft. When she turns to walk towards him, and her hooves echo like blades on the marble underneath, she wonders if he can see the way she's all hard edges and dull hate now.
Now, she really is the most dangerous thing in the mountains. Overhead her dragon dips low, off again to the sea to eat until he's bloated and sleepy. It is easier for Fable to forgot how to be a weapon. Because Isra when she says, “Hello nameless stranger,” still cants her horn into the silver moonlight like a blade. And in that moment, she knows her heart will not forget.
Even the fireflies are leaving space between where their wings end and her skin begins.
@blyse // <3
