Beneath her skin her bones are starting to feel like daggers. Her blood is starting to feel like an itch running through her in bolts of electricity. Every part of her feels strange, just like the sea always felt strange and peaceful when she wandered into the black depths with a story so long ago. She feels, she feels, oh she feels too many thing to sort out. Each nameless weighted thing feeds the magic, and the fury, and the way her dragon is flying further and further out towards the desert.
Isra knows she should call him back. She should lay beneath a mighty wing and tell him a story of love and bravery. But she does neither, all she does it look out towards the mountains. Too well Isra knows what is beyond those monoliths. There is suffering, starvation, fear. And there is Eik, the very song her heart is still beating to (isn't love a war?).
When she turns away to press their hips together she knows, oh she knows, that she's going back. Isra swallows down the words, she begs her heart to sing another tune. Wouldn't it be so much easier to love only her city? Instead she must love both and her body feels pulled apart by love, and war, and the need to root out every drop of black evil in this world.
She feels primordial, like she is all the bits of the universe fighting against a mortal cage.
“I will make us a fortress then.” Each step she takes into the ash and smoldering arches of wood brings a bit of her furious heart into the world. Wood turns to marble, cloth to reams of chain-mail and the soft ground turns to moonstone. Walls of stone and steal replace the charred rubble. Each change makes her eyes shine a little like stars and they catch each lingering, dying flame and make them into something dangerous.
Isra does not only feel primordial then. She is, oh she is.
“The time has come for you to be a champion Katniss.” It's not a request, but rather the sharp stab of faith falling like a gavel in the new space between them. It's not gentle, but they are not gentle females anymore.
Not anymore. Never again.
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