Isra and the dark brine
“ts suffocating snow, as brightness, pouring itself out of you, ”
“ts suffocating snow, as brightness, pouring itself out of you, ”
I
t becomes hard to remember that she is alone, and cold, and full of the taste of red, when Marisol presses their cheeks together. Isra thinks of the way her knees felt when she knelt before a thunder-bird and offered it a story instead of blood. It feels like a prayer that she knows she'll never regret, and one that her heart will keep singing like a storm even when her bones grow old, brittle and start to beg for dirt. Marisol feels like a shadow against her, all owl wings in the dark night that are impossibly hard to feel. She feels like soot and smoke and things that Isra wants to swallow down until the taste of it crawls through the muscles in her lungs. Marisol, Marisol, Marisol-- she feels like suffocation, like drowning, like satin and silk.
She does not feel like sand and root pulled tight between teeth.
Isra looks up at the gold light glinting off copper and off brink. Her breath runs up the glass not like frost but like ivy made of dew drops instead of sunlight and seed. In it she can see patterns. But mostly she can only see the way it crawls over the frost Marisol left behind, and the way it consumes all of it until there is only glass and a reflection of heat. Is it fire Marisol feels against her throat, or a death made raw and waiting beneath a shroud of dirt-brown skin?
This embrace makes Isra feel a longing for something wild and untamed. She wants something that would take a crown between its teeth and chew, and chew, and chew until there was only smelted down gold left to spit on the ground. A shadow, Fable, passes over them and she starts to long for the sea (for the black, for the darkness that makes lying as easy as breathing).
Her voice is low, the cry of a barn owl on a foggy night as it finds a lone mouse. There is a hunger in it, a nameless and deep belly roar. “Tell me I am not alone in this.” In fire, in hunger, in feeling like a monster, in feeling like she should be buried in the dark. Isra doesn't know how to say the words but all she knows is that she feels terrible, and monstrous, and as horrible as a god.
Couldn't they be gods together-- if only for a little while?
The glass before her ripples and grows black as death, black as the endless night. It's black long enough for her to blink and tuck her head tighter against Marisol so that the Commander will not see. And then it is only glass again and her breath is painting more vines of fire over the clear surface. Isra is glad that all the fog of her fire blots out the reflection of them, of two bodies bending and breaking (but never being remade).
She can smell the brine on Marisol, the blackness of the salted deep. But Isra only thinks it's her own sorrow leaking through her skin like a beast that has forgotten how to be tame. Because all Isra can taste is her sorrow leaking through like a sea without a bottom.
It's enough to drown an entire city.
@Marisol | "speaks" | notes: <3
