When he says that he is afraid of her all the magic in her blood rises up. It begs her to lay her horn against the pulse below this throat. It begs her to trace shivering pathways down his his cheek until he can feel how hungry that hollow bone might be for tainted, evil blood. Each thought burns electric in her marrow. She burns with it. A flower turns sharp edged and silver at her hooves. .
Isra doesn't think about the sea when she steps closer. She's thinking about thunderbird's with hate between the cracks across their glass skin. Now she understands it-- how monsters look at hunters when all they want to do is survive and learn to love something else but meat. Once she was afraid too, of men with dragons and hate in their hearts. She's still afraid of it.
“Your fear makes a fool of you.” Her words are dull, dirty teeth still begging for skin. The sound her horn makes when she turns it away from that fluttering beat below his throat sounds like sorrow. Even that is tired. When she moves against it's only so that he might see the sheen of an old scar on her hip.
Some nights she still dreams about digging graves with her horn, and feeling bones scrape against her teeth. It's on those mornings that she wakes up in a pile of black dirt instead of chain-mail. The magic in her skin roars, and sobs, and howls at the memory.
Each flower crumbles down to dirt. Roots turn to bone that rise up from all that brown like worms. The bars of the cage are left bare. They glitter gold when each leaf of ivy turns to ash and starts to fall around them like snow. Isra trembles like a doe when the ash hits her even though magic is still running through her electric. “Do not talk to me about how everyone like you is the first to burn.” Beneath her lips her teeth are gnashing, aching and begging to pull at something (at anything). “I have starved on the streets of this city. I have slept with only rats and spiders to chase back the chill. I have fed the sea. You are not alone in that and neither am I.” Isra is careful not to step on any bones when she moves closer to him still. But she does not look at them; she does not need the sight to know how white they are against the dirt.
This time she does lay her horn against his cheek. This time the shadows moving over them two of them are not pretending to be clouds. The breeze blowing the ash into tornadoes around them does not smell like crisp, clean mountain air. It smells like brine.
“The world is suffering because there are fools like you that think their suffering is somehow greater than the rest. They take their pain and call it right when they etch it into the marrow of the world around them.” Isra lifts her horn from him and it sighs in the briny breeze when she shakes loose the ash clinging to it. Her eyes start to sting and ache just like her teeth. “And so queens are made with magic enough to shake loose the fools grown bloated with hate. Dragons are born without fire in their bellies and they learn to save instead of destroy.” She is howling even though her voice is as quiet as the sound dirt makes when it's piled over blackened bones.
“Should I do nothing because you are afraid? Because monsters like Raum are not afraid to let the world burn just so something else suffers in just the way that they have.” Isra bares her teeth at him, because if she is a lion it is only because the world has made one of her.
But it's not meat that fuels her. It's always been love.
Yet she still eats his apology like the empty thing it is.
@Abel
