Isra does not follow his gaze to the water and back. She knows it's freshwater he's seeing, waves dragon born instead of wind born and slate where soil should be. It's an easy thing to imagine it all when she closes her eyes. It's a harder thing when it makes her heart ache like an arrow of glass rain has sunk into it. Isra thinks she'll always ache when she thinks of the sea, always. “Yes.” She answers, but her voice seems strange-- part girl, part sea-dragon, and part god.
Then she looks at the lake as it settles and when she blinks she knows that even that blackness behind her eyelids is not as dark as the deep water. And somehow knowing that gives her the bravery to open her eyes so that Ipomoea might see some of the saltwater secret living there. “It is both the same and different. There's hope there, and suffering, but the violence beneath the waves makes all this, in this world, softer. The sea only knows how to survive and how to take.” She tries to smile, but it waivers so. Like the scale in her heart (all violence and all softness) the tilt of her lips hasn't decided which way to turn.
She walks towards the water, her hooves leaving prints of molten gold in the grass. Each ripples in the wind like flame, although when a rabbit steps into the track she leaves behind it'll be cool to the touch. Fable lifts his head from the water and blows a fountain of black-water out across the smooth surface. When it ripples Isra counts the number like she'd count constellations when the night seem to long and sleep seems so far away.
“Would you like to see?” When she steps into the water, ankle deep, the surface of the water nearest her turns to some strange combination of ice and glass. It's cool, and hard and when she steps onto the surface of it cracks like a challenge. Isra looks at Ipomoea and his blade. Her eyes ask him how brave can you be?
She takes another step. More cracks bloom like a map leading the way to a secret story. At the edge of her cracking pathway an old, rotten tree long drowned waits. And until their aim is as true as their breaths, Isra will practice with him.
Until being brave seems like the only thing to be.
“Therefore, when we neglect to fear such a brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless.”
@Ipomoea a closer <3
