Once it was only the moonlight that called to her the moment it started to rise. Each time the sky started to grow dark, with layers and layers of blue painted upon each other, she would feel her skin start to itch with the whisper to live, and dance, and sometimes run like a wild thing. Now the mornings are starting to call to her and they rarely feel alive with freedom like the night had.
The mornings feel to Isra like fate. Each is heavier than the last and she wonders how long it will take for sunlight to fall on her back like anvils.
So as the sun rises, she rises with it. The air is hazy with ash, and smoke, and a weight that tastes like sorrow each time she inhales. It makes her tongue feel thick behind her teeth. She tries not to think of how brine sometimes feels the same when she's standing by the sea saying, I'm not coming back.. The thought keeps climbing back up like a storm each time she shoves it down and begs her magic to devour it, or change it to something new.
Isra comes to the first building hollowed out by fire and each ember turns to a seed as she walks through it. Her heart tugs at her, and tugs, and tugs. She stumbles with weight of the pull, like a tide. At first she looks towards the sea. Then she looks towards the sky wondering if it's Fable or a fresh terror spit out by the gods to bring them suffering. And when she cocks her horn towards a shadow she waives when she sees the leopard moving through the black.
If it wasn't cloudy, and bright-eyed, she would have through it was another weed she needed to pull against in the black of all her dreams.
It moves and Isra follows. Beneath her skin he heart beats steady and she hopes it doesn't need to pick up a new war-drum song. The cub appears and still she follows. Together they pause at each ruin and she watches the cub dissolve into the darkness and return with a small treasure. She knows enough of stories to be patient and wait for the end.
So she follows them past the city, through the meadow, around, the lake. Fable does not wake from his dreaming slumber upon the castle roof. But his thoughts of fish, and waves, and sharks follow Isra as closely as her shadow when she walks towards the base of the mountains.
It's only then that she starts to remember the gods and their mountains. She starts to remember what a trap feels like, and how she couldn't deafen her ears (and her heart) to the sound of betrayal. The leopard speaks and she does not think to call it strange. Isra only listens closely and hands her bow over to the magic of the cub waiting.
When the mother tells her to pray Isra's first reaction is to toss her horn until it is sighing in the late dawn like a sword through a willow branch. She steps closer but she does not kneel and she does not bow her head in submission. Only her eyes close. She begins, and she thinks of death the entire time.
“I pray that this world will find the way to peace again.” Although she wants to pray for Raum's death, for vengeance she doesn't. When the pool turns bright with white flame her eyes flicker open. She looks towards the edge of the fire, until white sparks are flashing in aching bolts across her visions. “I pray that we are all done suffering for the whims of unjust creatures.” The fire goes out. The leopard breaks the silence of her prayer.
She steps closer to gather her bow back, and when the etchings on it start to glow she smiles. It is more wild than kind, and the silver glow of her bow reflects strangely on the teething showing from between her black lips.
Fable wakes up and there are no more images of the sea rushing disjointedly through her mind. Isra does not notice that the leopards are gone. That part of a story has ended, she has only known when the ink has started to dry an a page has been turned.
She steps closer to the empty pool and brushes her nose against the stone. It turns to ore, and pearl, and amber with black specks caught in it. Isra speaks again, but it is no prayer that falls like a blade from her teeth. “And I promise that if any more suffering comes to anything I love that I will not stop until the cause of it is dead.” Each word cleaves the silence and the last of a holy weight in fading shadows.
Isra does not look backwards when she leaves to head home.
@Random Events
