There is only time, it seems, to feel like a lion in the tall-grass. Or maybe there is only time to feel like the sea, primordial and ever hateful towards the soft shore that pretends not to erode a little more each day. And maybe like the sea, Isra is only going on because she knows that each time she dissolves into brine and salt all the cruel things in the world are swallowing down a little bit more of her moonlit water.
When she dreams now it's dark and she's a riptide in the blackness-- pulling, and pulling, and pulling. Her teeth ache from pulling and each time she wakes it is upon a bed turns to iron and chain-mail. Today when she wakes she leaves the iron and heads towards Abel trapped in a garden.
Isra walks through the bars of the cage wrapped in blooming vines and each bit of steel turns to soft gold. It glitters like desert sand in the sun. She blinks and it turns to ash that whispers soft horrors when it falls towards the ground like charred food and dead dreams. Bits of the black cling to her and shine like caught space in the crease of her spine as she walks towards the boy with smoke clinging to his skin like remnants of a worried down noose.
Her horn makes a soft sigh when she points it in his direction. It waivers there, a needle trying so very, very hard to swing true north. A shadow passes over the sun and she does not need to wonder if it is cloud or wing. She always knows.
When she steps closer the garden does not change beneath her shadow. It stays nothing more than a garden, lovely and unaffected by the haze of soot still weighting down the air. She wonders which would terrify him more. “I can understand why you hate me.” Her horn waivers again as she lies. Because she doesn't under, not really.
The shadow passes over the sun again; it's slower this time, almost lazy.
“But do you care nothing for anyone else living in this city?” Isra does not step closer again. The flowers blooming at her feet and the wide leaves spanning like crowns over their heads do not change. Nothing changes but the fire in her eyes that flickers to life. It's speaking in blue flame and the reflection of the soot still clinging to her face, and what it's saying is--you did not hurt me, only them, and for that you must pay.
Below that, deeper still, her magic starts to roar.
@Abel
