"love is a burning flame"
The sight of the ropes on Metaphor's fetlocks makes her sick, and furious, and hateful. It widens all the cracks running molten though her body. Isra trembles with it and her heart races a furious beat beneath her skin. Sweat starts to pool across her browns. Her children start to flutter like hummingbirds at the points of her rib-cage. Every part of her aches, and throbs, and laments.
She steps forward even though she wants to run away to war, to violence, to anything but this sorrow. “Let us,” she says. Because if this was Eik, cold with ropes tied around his fetlocks and dirt staining his cheeks, Isra does not think she would only build a pyre to burn. Fable steps closer, and he is gentle with his paws when lowers the white shroud across the body. He is gentler still when he lifts the corpse (he does not know how to think of it as anything but something dead and waiting to burn) to the pyre.
Isra watches and tries not to realize that she would burn the world to the ground if she was the one with the torch. Her children kick again, as if say, and we would drown it.
Katniss takes the torch and Isra tries everything to stop this terrible trembling of her spine. And even though she still doesn't want to move closer she steps close enough that her shoulder is brushing Katniss's and the air can hardly whisper in the space between their hips. “I am here, Katniss.” There are still tears falling diamond hard from her eyes. Each clatters on the stone louder than her racing, trembling, cracking heart. Just like the trembling she doesn't know how to stop this either. Fable lays his nose against her hip with just enough weight to say I am here too.
The silence between their heartbeats sounds deafening. It carries something through her-- something thicker, and darker, and redder than blood. “I will always be here.” Isra touches her nose to Katniss's dirty cheek. It feels like touching salt dried up on a rock by the sea.
That is when Isra knows, with a terrible awful knowing, that both of them will always have that something running like sludge through them. And to call it sorrow feels like calling a dragon a bird.
It is, and will always be, a thing more terrible than that.
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