When she looks at him and traces the way his lips form a gentle word like butterflies she cannot help but think that they are both suited for things other than crowns. Isra wants to take the word from him and pretend that she wasn't about to say she would turn the volcano into a pyre.
And then she would have told him that it's gods and ghosts she would place upon it. It would not have burned for them.
So she touches their shoulders together and she tries to bury all the awful things growing like vines inside her where once there was only stars and sorrow. Each black dot of ash that falls on her, bloated with water, turns to to seed. Soon it's roses, and apples and pears running down her skin mixed with the rain. When she shakes more and more seeds fall to the sand beneath their hooves that has never seen the stars, or the silver moon.
Isra wonders where the tide will take them when Asterion loosens his noose around the waves. Part of her hopes that far out in the deep a god will see them as bits of warning, that they will clog his tides. She hopes he will choke on it.
Because Isra is not returning to the sea. The stars own her now, and she owns the stars, and the moon and each constellation hiding a story.
“After this we could change it. We could change all of it.” Fable loops lower, and her tangled soaked hair almost sings in the weight of that dragon breeze. A fountain of sea-water joins the rain and the dragon swings it like a sword through the black ash that is still turning to seed the moment it touches Isra's skin.
She brushes her nose against his cheek and she thinks it must have been an easy thing for Eik to learn how to love the dusk king. “I will always be loyal to you Asterion.” And that word loyal, sounds nothing like butterflies when she drops it from between her teeth.
Even that falls in the sea like a water-fat seed.
@Asterion
