“We the mortals touch the metals, the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,"
The only religion she wants tonight is the church tree singing in the wind. The only light she wants is silver-light dancing through color glass. The only patterns she wants is the black lines between one star and the next (on and on and on). The only taste she wants on her tongue is sweet clover, and lavender, and violet.
All Isra wants tonight is Eik.
So she heads to their church-tree as the first drop of rain falls fat and heavy on her nose. And when she looks up she thinks not of the rain but of the sea and how it felt caught between her teeth, and between the walls of her lungs. She thinks of moonlight too when Fable makes a canopy of wing to shield her from the rain. Somewhere she knows meteors are falling bright and violent through the dark. She can feel it, that violence in the night pulsing through her in drumbeats that make all her bones, all her muscles, every part of her ache.
The grass around her turns to pale-blue flowers, lighter than the white-wash of the sea beneath a sighing moon. Each drop of rain makes the petals shine and glimmer. It looks like the sky is raining metallic instead of sadness. Perhaps if the church-tree wasn't so close ahead she would have paused to brush a kiss against a weeping bloom. Maybe she would have gone to the lake to see if her lips shined like a half drawn constellation. Instead she only leaves the cover of dragon wing for the tinkling, chiming glass-leaves and amber bark.
Her horn seems quiet tonight, without the rain echoing in the hollowness of her, or the night wind howling weakly through the bone curls of it. Everything seems quieter when the rain sings against the strange tree and dragon scale. Even the song the meadow is singing seems hushed. Isra thinks the loudest part of the night is all this aching in her body. Her children are tangled up still, like marsh weeds, and they seem to be chanting notes through the marrow of her bones.
And Isra knows she should be worried, or afraid, or anything but this terrible wanting (and aching, and trembling).
There is a sheen of briny sweat above her eyes by the time she beds down on the moon-pale and shining flowers. If there was not the song of rain on glass and scale, the tree would echo back nothing more than the thready sound of her lungs as they start to heave, and pant, and sob in her chest.
Eik, her mind howls. She prays he is listening. The chiming tree seems to bend in the wind and pray with her.
Fable starts to keen and the sound makes her ears hurt when he tucks his head beneath the willow tree and lays it beside her bloated belly. “It won't be long now.” Isra tell him with a kiss to that salted, scaled nose of his. She can see the way it smokes across the cool planes of his face like fog (and oh it's terrible but it reminds her of Marisol and the bakery window). Isra lays her throat across that mirror of green-scale and starts to count the beats of her own heart.
It's picking up, fast little thrums of war-song and sea crash.
She wonders which of her children will be war and which will be the sea. The rain continues on as if it does not care and wants only some offering of blood and love.
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