“I feel like a part of my soul has loved you since the beginning of everything. Maybe we’re from the same star.”
Eik always brings the rain with him, and sorrow, and love. He is freshwater, and dew-drops, and water steaming the heat from her skin. Her heart slows, her children slow their quickening, everything slows to the rhythm of raindrops on fevered skin and stained-glass leaves. He is everything. Isra looks at him like it's the moon falling through the dark sky (or rain on the dry desert sand) and she has been blind for all her life. Through the pain of birth she smiles at him and it's the brightest look her face has ever sculpted itself into.
How had she ever thought she loved war like this?
Between her skin her children are rushing forward into the world-- with the rain and the lighting cracking white wounds across the black sky. Isra bites the inside of her cheek. Blood blooms metallic across her tongue, and teeth. She tries-- oh she tries so very hard-- not to cry out. There is still the memory of her past like floating behind her eyes, be silent, be quiet, don't let them hear how they have cursed you.No matter how hard she tries a sob leaks out and she tucks her nose into the comfort of Eik until the smell of night-black sand soothes her.
I hope so, Fable answers Eik although what he wants to do is roar at the sky for this part of life he knows nothing of. All he can do is breath out brine and saltwater for Isra (and his twins), and hope that the sea settles her more than the soft clatter of raindrops on the glass-tree.
A rumble of thunder makes the first child break free into the world. It's not her parents that she turns her eyes to. Instead she opens them to the lighting racing across the sky, and more colors than she might ever learn of reflection patterns across the bloody ground. Her frail, young heart, aches at all that brightness. And if she smells a little like the sea already there is too much rain and sweet-grass to untangle where her ocean begins and Fable's ends. On her head a horn swings wildly (wild, wild, wild) towards where her sister is just breaking into the world.
Later her parents might remember the way the entire glass tree, and every blade of grass, and every summer flower, paused and turned its roots towards the pale girl. Later they might wonder how the lighting settled between one sister and the next. Only the rain kept up, quick as their youthful heartbeats. Now, though, there is only the way that her eyes look towards her twin and the dark sky instead of her parents. Her horn points towards the tree like a soft hello from the only language newborns now how to speak.
Isra turns to look towards Eik and her eyes are liquid with sea, and love, and amethyst. “They will be everything.” She smiles and in the look is-- they already are. And with the thunder rumbling towards the mountain and the lightning fighting a battle against the dark, Isra lays her head against the man who has always been everything.
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