Isra is wondering down a dark road as the doe tells her story. Like a river the past runs across the dark places behind her eyes. It sparks like a storm when she presses her eyes closed against it. Sometimes it feels like drowning, feeling the echo of all the things her skin used to be, and sometimes it feels only like the oppressive weight of the deep, dark sea.
When she shakes her head the humid air whistles a little through the cracks in her horn. It reminds her of home, of the wind whistling through the hollows of her mountains. And then, Isra with her ring of teeth-scars around her throat, doesn't feel so full of fury. Instead acceptance starts to bloom beneath her bones. Her smile is a weak thing though as she uses her magic (and oh she's a little jealous of that green glow) to push the bow closer to Cally. “I too used to wear a different skin and it was taken from me by a god.” That weak smile grows a little wild, a little reckless. It starts to look like something that a unicorn with a sword crown should wear.
She looks a little dangerous then, and maybe when she turns it's the sea frothing in her eyes instead of the reflection of the dappled sunlight. “Sometimes though, I wonder if it's the gods that made me what I'm supposed to be.” And she doesn't say the end of them, but she's thinking of it when she recalls the blackness of the primordial sea and the way all the gods brought destruction and games each time they wandered down to the mortal coil.
Sometimes she wonders if they don't fear death as much as a warrior wielding a weapon fears it just a little.
So when she steps closer and says, “It will last until I ask it become something else.” there are a hundred feeling beneath the words. Isra blinks and the bow becomes a sword, then a dead branch before turning back to a bow lovely and delicate enough for a doe to wield. Overhead a crow screams and a wildcat roars back. The island comes back to life around them, all the wildlife adjusted to the two mares in the middle of it. Isra draws her own bow, and cants her head upward when the wind sings once more through her hollow spiral of a horn.
“I would help you hunt for your magic if you would let me.” This time when she smiles it's not with the idea that magic can be found in the forest, or under a rock. Isra is smiling because she knows that sometimes magic comes from dark, evil things.
Sometimes one has to die to be remade, this she understand as much as she understands all the ways in which she is full the strange combination of love and fury. And if they must hunt for a relic--
Then Isra will hunt (and she'll fool herself that it's a relic she's looking for).
@Callynite
