" for wild wolfish women with sharp teeth and sea in their hair "
From the cliff, with the wind whipping against her shoulders, Isra had watched Antiope come to the sea. Even when the other mare took to the tide she stayed on the cliff with the starlight cool upon her back.
Fable is flying lazy circles over her head between the thick early morning clouds. There are dewdrops forming on his wings that fall like promises on her spine we he flies low enough to whip a whistle of air through her horn. It is going to rain today. He says and Isra only looks out to the horizon with the dark pooling clouds. She shivers.
It always feel like it's going to rain. Even when she dreams it's rain and running, rain and running.
The roar of the waves brings her back to the earth and she looks away from her dragon to watch Antiope swim deeper and deeper into the black sea. From her vantage point she can see the waves far from shore gathering, and gathering, and gathering with the horizon storm. Isra is already running down the cliff when the wave crashes over Antiope.
Fable. She bellows down their link but the dragon is already diving into the ocean, nothing knows how the riptides go better than him. It's in his blood-- the pull of salt, and brine, and sand. Rocks are dashing themselves against her hooves only to become rubies and seeds rolling wildly down to the shore in the wake of her. She does not stop (running or turning the world into something else) until Antiope rises from the sea.
The first things Isra notices are her eyes, golden like ichor and god-blood. She steps closer and her own hoof prints leave puddle of golden where the sand has been pressed down beneath her weight. It's the anger though flashing through all that gold, that makes something in Isra perk up and howl. And later she won't know what it is that made her laugh to hear it in her blood and see it in Antiope's eyes. Later she might call it madness, the way she starts to laugh like a wild thing with the sea roaring out a denial behind them.
But for now she is laughing (and it leaves a taste like viciousness on her lips, like freedom, like alive, alive alive). “I thought the sea might have claimed you.” Laughter is still leaking through her words-- laughter and something deeper, darker, blacker. Fable peaks his head up through cresting wave and there is a fish hanging from between his teeth. The sight of it makes the blackness a little more like moon-black dappled silver.
She steps closer and the whole shore ripples and sheds it's skin of sand. With no more than an inhale it's rubies, and bone-white coral, and golden ore stretching out around them. It all seems like brightness to chase away the coming sun. And maybe it's a little like Isra is telling the sun to turn away because the night needs not the warmth of it.
@Antiope
