Isra wants to laugh at him for being a fool over and over again. She wonders if his skin would taste like scale. He could be that snake going around and around the world again chewing on his own tail for all the cleverness he shows. She wants to carve his eyes out too, with the hollow, wanting tip of her horn and let the crows feast upon them. Do you see now, can you hear it, she would tell him, listen how they feast and pluck at the bits of you that are dead and bleeding. Even then, when his eyes can no longer be foolish bits of ignorance trapped in a globe, she does not think he will understand the ways of crows.
But Isra has known the ways of crows since the alley where she turned a blade into a daisy. There she had turned stones to apples, and rot to glory, and a ghost had stalked her and promised her that the world could not be saved. And then--
Then she knew, that she would do anything, become anything to change it all.
Maybe that is why she only looks at a sea with a cold knowing . Perhaps it's why she doesn't walk into the waves anymore. She runs. Never again, she tells the sea each time she's on the sands, never again will I be anything but mine. If nothing else it is the reason she does not stop showing her teeth until he looks away.
“No,” she says as low as a horizon bleeding out at the ocean, “I didn't save that flower nor the bee that will come looking for the pollen it could have shed.” Isra inhales and it tastes like char, and brine, and blood when she bites her tongue to keep herself from attacking him. “Did you ever think what it might mean, that I can turn ants to bees and flowers to bone and leaves to gold? Were you ever clever enough to think of what else I might do? Or was it enough to listen to Raum when he told you I was terrible, and that your hunger was the only thing that mattered in the world? Did you ever think, even just for a moment, that there are things in this world that can create as much as they can destroy?” She steps away because she still wants to cut out his eyes and listen to the crows come calling a song.
And as she steps away the garden, the graveyard, the prison all changes again. Every pillar of bone becomes a young tree with small apples just starting to fall between the fat leaves. Every patch of dusted, charred dirt becomes wheat dancing in the breeze like small snakes trapped in the earth. The graveyard becomes a garden for more than beautiful flowers and foolish boys. It becomes food.
By Abel's feet a few stones have turned to bars of gold. They glint in the sunlight like blood glints in moonlight. “If I was Raum I would kill you.” Behind them Fable lands and his eyes look colder than Isra has ever seen them look. They are arctic. She wonders if Fable will agree with what she's about to do. It is the first time she has not known.
“But I'm not Raum.” Isra, for the first time, does not feel like this softness she cannot shed is good. “ Run far from here and do not look back. If you do, if you touch Denocte or Novus one more time with hate in your heart I kill you. So take the gold, start a new life, and learn to not be a fool.” Isra says nothing more, but her eyes start to turn as glacier cold as her dragons.
Fable lifts up his wings and stretches his neck towards the clouds. He roars and Isra says, “run.”, because she does not know if her dragon wants to be as soft as her. He is as tried of suffering as she is, only dragons do not feel sorrow in all the same ways as unicorns do.
Sorrow makes dragons feral and it makes unicorns become like the sea.
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
@Abel
