Isra and the stepping song
“And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots”
“And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots”
I
sra is thinking about blood, about the way her's feels like a storm that never wants to be caught on the mountains again. Even now as she's wandering the streets of a city that does not belong to her, with cracks of electricity running down her spine with wants and needs she has no name for, her thoughts are tumbling over and over themselves like blood tumbling through the same four caverns of her heart. Over and over again it tumbles, and tumbles, and tumbles. Sometimes, when the day is the brightest and the war in her chest feels like a holocaust, she just wants all the things tumbling inside her to stop---
like the way the flowers stop swaying in the wind with teeth when she walks by and turns them to blooms of ruby, and opal, and tourmaline.
There is that color again-- blood. It's in everything she touches now.
The course of it changes in her veins with Fable calls out from above, there. It slows, it coagulates, it turns to diamonds falling through those caves in her heart. It hurts, it aches, and it pulls her towards the smell of spices on the wolf-wind. Isra follows it as if there is a noose around her neck pulling her up towards some place she didn't know she needed to reach. Her hooves are moving across the stone and they are singing sounds she didn't know she needed to sing.
And maybe they sound a little like I- clip- am- clop- sorry. But Isra doesn't notice that either, the same way she doesn't notice that she's turning all the spring flowers around her to stone.
How could she notice anything when, suddenly (like the way she wants it to just suddenly stop hurting), Marisol is there ringed in soft lantern light? How could she notice anything but the way the light snags on the blood ringing the Commander's eyes like it's lines of opal cutting through a sea of liquid bone?
Isra does not think Marisol will think too terribly of the way she's changing the word and making it still as death in the places where she grips it by the throat. Or at least she hopes, or maybe prays, not.
"Marisol.” She doesn't mean for it to come out like a sacrament, like a wish, like an echo of all the cracks running through her heart. But it does. It comes out like a smoke signal, spiraling out from her in patterns of heat that make the space between them look like winter. Isra hopes that Marisol will be able to read the patterns of the looping spirals of her own name, of the way it dissolves in the black and the golden-light-- the way it spreads out to touch everything.
When she moves closer the city around them is so silent (silent as stone) that the only sound is the echo of their breaths, and the heavy clang of sorrow that is throbbing through her. Of course Marisol can hear it, Isra thinks. They have never lied to each-other-- not with their bodies, or the way they come together like swords on a battle-field of corpses.
But still, when she touches her nose to the downy softness of a sooty wing, she can't help but wish that all the tumbling shards inside her would just---
stop.
@Marisol | "speaks" | notes: <3
