"Seek out the signs that precipitate desires: Shooting stars, falling objects.”
It would not be wrong to say Isra is running through the dark again. She's always running now. Through the dark, through a meadow of dying light, through sand that shifts to pearl in the small half-moons she leaves in the shore-- she is running. Her nose is lifted towards the sky and she's running after the acidic tang of poison on the wind. Sometimes when she lifts her nose it's only to smile with her teeth (like fangs) at her dragon swooping overhead.
It would also not be wrong to say that she can feel the brush of Eik against her cheek like a ghost. In each step she takes, in each inhale of tainted air, the island is telling her that Eik is here--Eik is here. And still she keeps running because her teeth are aching and hungry like monsters between the dark gap of her lips.
She knows he would read it from her eyes, the way that she's wrapped in justice and her magic is roaring, roaring for blood. Isra isn't ready to let him touch her again and taste all the ways in which she's still a star imploding upon itself. Not yet. So she walks deeper into the jungle and further into the black, until the meadow of fireflies is crunching under her hooves and pulsing like her broken, aching heart.
Then she turns to him, and watches the way the light makes him holy. She stops running into the dark, into the places where she is a monsters, a hunter, and sometimes some terrible concoction of the two. Fable swoops low overhead and the fireflies move like a wave underneath the current his wings leave behind.
Isra walks through those places, where one crest of light curls over the last in a frothy glow. She walks in the only direction she ever really wants to go-- towards him.
Eik traces the shape of her in kisses. Isra worships all the worn gray of him skin in all the ways, with all the fire, that the light never could. He whispers to her belly, to their twin stars, and she only looks at him with all the ferocity trapped in her small, delicate body.
She glows. Of course she glows, there are dying fireflies all around them (and under them).
But she only calls the silver-light between them love. All the death in the world would not make her call it anything else.
“I wondered.” She says into the place where his mane meets his ears, where there is no sound for him to hear but way her voice moves over his skin. Fable roars overhead and all the fireflies take to the sky in a meteor shower that has forgotten which way it is supposed to fall.
Isra smiles into the secret place of his poll even though she knows he will not be able to see it.
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